


Hollow Bones and Hollow Hearts

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: (You Won’t Believe What Happens Next), Alternate Universe, Argumentative Ten Year Old Given Black Magic, Aspiring Swashbuckler, Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Gen, Homelessness, Karmic Justice, Marked (Young) Emily AU, Orphaned Emily AU, Selectively Mute Corvo Attano, Unfortunate Sewer Adventures, Where the Loyalists are Mostly Irrelevant, animal companion, protagonist swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-10-18 20:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17588078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: They say an Empress should be prepared for anything, but Emily’s not sure her lessons were ever meant to prepare her for this. She’s been at the Golden Cat for six months, and it’s clear now that she’ll have to rescue herself – perhaps that will be made easier by the gifts the black-eyed man passes to her in the Void.





	1. Heart on Your Sleeve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six months have passed since Emily, the royal heir, was abducted by assassins working for the Spymaster, now the Lord Regent. Now, hidden away in the Golden Cat, she's got a visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This AU was inspired by the wonderful art of tumblr user @rose-under-your-bed, which can be found [here](http://rosy-under-your-bed.tumblr.com/post/175896694602/dishonored-but-lil-emily-is-left-orphaned-and).

Emily didn’t know what anyone here was talking about most of the time. When her mother had taken her to court, she’d managed to put a few things together, like there was a whale oil shortage and the King and Queen of Morley kept making impossible promises to their people and the Rudshore Financial District might never ever recover from the flooding.

The conversations at the Golden Cat were different; changing money for body parts and other nonsense things. She always tried to listen to the High Overseer’s conversations when he visited, but she hardly ever understood what he was talking about.

“Regretfully,” he droned one day, “our _esteemed guest_ down at Coldridge Prison expired this morning. It seems the Royal Interrogator was a little too enthusiastic in his persuasive methods.”

Emily just kept colouring in her drawing of a whale carrying her through the clouds. She was sitting on the ring balcony the floor above the parlour. He was talking to Custis and Morgan – their conversations were usually more interesting. Once or twice, she had heard Corvo’s name and strained her ears harder.

Her questions about where he was continued to be met with indifference, and her reminders that she was the Imperial Princess seemed not to phase anybody. One of these reminders had even been met with laughter from Marissa, one of the girls who lived here. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too, sweetie. Me too.”

Campbell knew who she was, so did the twins, and Madame Prudence seemed to know everything that went on in the Golden Cat. Campbell always asked her how she was doing when he visited, but he never listened to what she had to say. She suspected that having to study the Seven Strictures every single day for his incredibly long life had taken a toll and made his brain just as boring and monotonous.

“Emma,” whispered one of the girls. Constance. She was wrapped in a dressing gown on the landing, and beckoned to follow her down the stairs.

Emily gathered her pencils and incomplete drawing, and followed. “It’s Emily,” she reminded her.

“Right,” Constance apologised, leading her into the dressing room where several of the other girls were already gathered in varying states of dress. “Sorry. Mr. Smith brought a whole feast for Violetta again. Thought you’d want in.”

She hopped up on the table and peered into the huge basket. “Did he bring any of those little trifles?”

“Ha!” said Loulia. “I told you she’d ask about those. Yeah, here.”

She handed her a cup full of cream, custard and jelly, and a spoon. As Emily let the sugary dessert fill her mouth, she hoped with all her might that this became a regular occurrence. Mr. Smith had good taste in food, and if he was going to visit this often, she’d be eating like an Empress again in no time.

“Won’t the fella get suspicious when you don’t fatten up from eating all this food?” Constance asked, biting into an apricot tartlet and letting the sweetness show in the glow on her face.

Violetta rolled her eyes as she licked her spoon clean, and then put the back of her hand to her forehead and spoke in a tragic voice. “It’s just these conditions, Mr. Smith, you see. The Madame, she’s working me to the bone and I just can’t keep an ounce of fat on them. I swear I have to eat twice my weight a day just to keep from passing out on top of people.”

The girls roared with laughter and congratulated her while they kept digging in, and Emily took another spoon of cream. People said such strange things in this house.

That night, with her finished picture mounted on the wall of her attic room, Emily dreamt of whales. They flew amongst bricks set adrift in the air and chirped and moaned. She watched them from a platform of stone suspended in nothing, and when the one closest to her disappeared from view, she followed it up a spiralling staircase.

At the top of the stairs was the gazebo overlooking the Wrenhaven River at Dunwall Tower. She stopped at its edge and saw the twisted arms and pale face of her mother on the ground. Her surroundings were dull, everything washed with grey-ish blue, but the blood on the flagstones was vibrant red.

The whales sang their mournful song from a distance.

Emily’s bare feet patted against the stone and stopped at the shaky line of red cutting through the bluescale. It was starting to seep into the piece of parchment by her hand – whatever bad news had originally been written there, it had been scribbled over with a new message:

SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE SHE IS GONE

She held her arms against a chill she wasn’t sure was real, and as she crouched down, she heard a voice – wet with blood and anguish, but unmistakable:

“Corvo…” her mother gasped, although her body stayed motionless. “It’s all… coming apart. Find… find Emily. Protect her. You’re the only one…”

Her heart lifted, sure that he would keep his promise, he would come to find her. He always listened to Mother, and he always found Emily even when she was doing her very best at hiding. Oh, and when he did, she could tell him all about the Golden Cat and how strange it was, and _this_ place with all the whales and the ghosts and how strange _it_ was… and then they would go home. Corvo would come for her. Everything would be alright.

Campbell’s awful boring drone shattered her moment of certainty. “Ward us all, look at what he’s done!” he said. He even made that sound dull. He was cursed, she was sure.

That grating Spymaster’s voice came next. “I’ll see you beheaded for this, Corvo!”

“It wasn’t him!” Emily shouted. “It wasn’t him, you stupid, wicked man!”

“Take him.”

She heard a thump and then the sound of her Protector dropping to the floor. For just a second, she saw his shadow lying there by her mother’s body, and then they dragged him away. She chased the footsteps out of the gazebo, shouting at them to stop, _stop_ in the name of the Empire.

She vaulted blocks of stone that barred her path, and hopped over gaps giving way to the nothingness that seemed to surround everything here. She remembered Corvo’s lessons as she ran.

_Don’t second-guess your ability. Either believe you can make it and jump, or believe you can’t and don’t._

The footsteps started to get further away, unhindered by the obstacles in her path.

_Keep an eye on alternate routes that you can take that may advantage you. You’re lighter and smaller than I am. Use that to gain ground faster._

She started to hear moans of agony. And then a scream, just barely restrained.

_Always have a fallback. If you reach for a high ledge, be sure there’s a low one you can drop to if it gives way or you miss._

As she climbed the ledge onto the highest platform yet, she heard one of the Watchmen talking. “His heart gave out. I’m telling you, that Sullivan guy isn’t right in the head. We didn’t want to execute the guy until he confessed.”

She could see the two guards, immobile, as they talked. They were looking at each other, but the one closest to the edge of the platform had his body turned to face oblivion, and his arms were slightly extended, like he had just thrown…

thrown…

One of Corvo’s eyes were cracked open, and he stared up lifelessly at the man who didn’t even have the decency to look at the body he was tossing away. There was a whole pile of corpses in a cart that the other guard was standing against, and behind that, a sign:

DUNWALL CITY SEWERS  
NO DUMPING ON PUNISHMENT OF FINE

The words blurred as tears filled her eyes. She turned back to Corvo and reached for his hand, which was suspended in the air as he fell like a ragdoll. His left eye and his lip were swollen red, and he was covered all over in bruises and burns and muck.

“Corvo,” she sobbed, and reached with her fingertips, trying to touch his. She was so close… She anchored herself on the index finger of the horrible Watchman, and reached as far as her arms would let her. Just a little bit further…

She slipped.

She didn’t have a fallback.

She was tumbling, past Corvo and all of the other debris floating in this place, through the clouds that shifted in impossible winds. She felt her tears being stripped from her eyes and a sob shook her chest. “Mummy…”

The air slowed into a gentle breeze. She opened her eyes just before she felt her toes touch cold stone, and then she heard a sigh that didn’t belong in a world she’d ever known.

“I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” said the man. He was pacing on the next step of the platform that they were standing on. “But it seems like my other options have all exhausted themselves.”

His voice sounded like the second bounce of an echo. Just one step removed from belonging to him. “Hello, Emily.” He turned to look at her directly, and she saw that his eyes were a dark chasm. She shivered.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He held out his arms. “I am the Outsider,” he says. “I—”

“No you’re not.”

His arms lowered slightly. It was hard to tell where he was looking, but she sensed that his gaze had moved to her. The ghost of a smile which had been shifting on his face had vanished into surprise. “What?”

“The Outsider is a leviathan who lives in the depths of the Void. You’re not a leviathan. You’re just… a man.” She’d read about sea monsters; they could topple ships and turn tides, and snatch people out of the air in a moment. The Outsider was supposed to be thousands of years old. This person didn’t even look older than Sokolov or Corvo or _anybody_.

The whales sang as they circled. The man seemed frustrated by her interruption, and drummed his fingers a few times against his arm before responding. “I think I know what I am better than the Abbey of the Everyman. How are they supposed to know me when they’re called heretics for looking at me too directly?”

Emily frowned. “That’s true…” she said, thinking carefully. “Okay. I’ll believe you’re the Outsider.”

“Very gracious of you, Your Highness,” he thanked her dryly. “Now, as I was saying… This Empire could be like clay in your hands, with the right tools. I would like to give you those tools.”

“Like a gift?” she asked.

He smiled an odd, unsettling smile. “Yes, a gift.”

“No thank you,” she answered politely.

Again, he wore a face of surprise. Emily got the impression that people didn’t question him very often. Maybe that was what happened when your only company was whales. “What?” he said.

“I’m not supposed to accept gifts,” she explained. “They have to be checked by the Royal Guard first.”

The Outsider’s eyebrows were pinched together. “Just take the Mark, you vexatious girl,” he commanded, and waved his hand.

She was about to tell him that he sounded just like her teachers, when her left hand began to burn. A shape was glowing bright on her skin, scorching it from the inside out, and left behind a black symbol. She felt it with her thumb as her cries died in her throat, but suddenly it felt as if it had always been there, hidden just below the surface of her skin.

The Outsider disappeared into dust, and behind him was a pathway. She pulled herself up onto the ledge and followed it until it curved around and stopped abruptly. There was another platform, much too far away to jump.

The Mark itched on her hand, and she was filled with a sudden confidence – she could make it. She took a few steps back, bent her knees, and fixed her eyes on the spot she wanted to land.

As she ran and leapt off the platform, the Mark pulled on strings connected to her heart, glowing brightly. She didn’t move in a perfect arc through the air; more like she was being kept aloft by

three

steady

wingbeats

before landing solidly on her destination. She twisted her neck over her shoulders when she did, and she saw the fading shadow of her new wings, settling back into invisibility when they weren’t needed.

There was only one way to go besides back, so she kept going. The Void was a mesmerising place, full of chunks of her world floating between dark, sleek jutting rocks. She found it hard to keep her focus.

The Outsider appeared once more. “I have one more gift to give. It will guide you in your journey.”

Emily was ready to protest again, but the sight of the thing stopped her short. It was a horrid, pulsing muscle, taken apart and filled with clockwork and stitched together again.

“The heart of a living thing, moulded by my hands,” he dubbed it, and passed it into her palm. She couldn’t believe this thing had ever been alive, or what help it could possibly be to her.

…Until it spoke. It lit up from the inside and pumped itself twice in her hand, and said:

_“This place is the end of all things. And the beginning.”_

It was Corvo’s voice.

The Royal Protector had never been a talkative person. Emily would sometimes overhear guards that were new on the rotation remark that it was creepy the way he just stood and watched like that, but she knew he didn’t mean to seem menacing or cold. It was just that if he could convey what he meant without speaking, he would.

She had many memories of conversations where she did all the talking – and although her governesses told her that this was not good manners, her mother had assured her that it was fine with Corvo.

“You can do enough talking for both of you, darling,” she’d said. “And you’re listening to what he’s saying, even though he doesn’t speak.”

When Corvo did speak, he chose his words carefully. The Heart held his voice; soft-spoken prose for only her mother’s ears and hers. He had never written it down or recorded those beautiful turns of phrase – he composed the lines one moment, and said them the next. It was poetry only meant to last in the memory, he said.

How she’d wished she could hear his voice these past months.

_"The one who walks here is all things. Cradle songs of comfort and bones gnawed by teeth."_

She clutched the Heart with both hands. “What did you do to him?” she whispered. All this clockwork, all the needle holes and thread woven through him. His voice was all that was left of him. All those ways he liked to talk without words, gone. In their place was the subtle, rough edge of a Karnacan accent that he so loathed other people to notice.

It wasn’t that he was ashamed of his birthplace, he had told her, nor his family. He was just tired of the way people looked at him when they were reminded he was Serkonan.

The Outsider had his head tilted slightly to one side. “He longs to help you, even when this is all of him that remains. Such is the Heart of the Royal Protector.”

He disappeared again, and this time, Emily felt herself going with him. Darkness crept around her edges, and she looked to the Heart. She was losing her grip on this world, this dream – she would lose him again. “Corvo!” she said urgently.

“Corvo!” she shouted into the room, and the sound stopped short without the echo of the Void. There was a lantern in the corner with a low, weak flame, and the rest of the little attic room was cast in shadow. Even after six months here, the dark corners of the Golden Cat preyed on her mind. It was easy to hide here. It was easy for anything to hide here, not just her.

Emily wished for light as she rubbed her eye, and all of a sudden it was all around her. It was as if daylight had been searching for her and finally found the room. She looked around in bewilderment until she saw the back of her hand as it lowered from her face.

A glowing rune was marked there, plucked straight from her dream. She felt something squirm in her pocket, like that time she had captured a field mouse when she was little, and from it she pulled the Heart. It was much too big to fit in her nightclothes, and producing it put a sudden weight in her hand as if it had appeared from nothing.

_“The clients are ushered through the halls quickly. They are much too busy to notice the peeling wallpaper and cheap décor.”_

The light faded from the room slowly, and as the lantern had burned out a few moments ago, soon the only light left in the room was from inside the pulsing Heart.

“Corvo,” Emily said. She tried to sound direct and commanding, like her mother could. “Can you hear me?”

_“There is something I must find. Somewhere I am needed.”_

She let the breath out of her chest and watched the Heart beat in her hands. “I’m here, Corvo,” she sniffed. She curled back onto her bed and clutched it close to her chest like it was her beloved doll, lost in Dunwall Tower. “You found me.”


	2. A Strange Visit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> High Overseer Campbell leads the city's militant religious faction and is a close ally to the Lord Regent. Campbell is completely corrupt and, in Emily's opinion, is overdue for the fright of his miserable life.

“What about that one?” Emily kept her hand close to her chest, but pointed her finger in the man’s direction.

_"He plots to take the whole inheritance for himself."_

“And him?”

_"They never shine up his shoes as much as he likes."_

Emily couldn’t see his shoes well from this distance, but she trusted the Heart’s assessment. She was on the ring balcony again, watching the “courtesans” escort their patrons in the parlour below. She’d asked Loulia what courtesans did, and she had answered, “We make people happy.”

She was sure that there were other ways to make people happy than wearing clothes that didn’t cover you up and painting your face in funny colours. The Heart pulsed as she eyed Loulia’s smile.

_“She sends the coin to her sister in Drapers Ward. They make it work.”_

Emily heard the door to Madame Prudence’s office open, and tucked the Heart back into her pocket. Staying close to the wall, she tip-toed down the stairs and leaned around the corner.

The Madame had her eyes and her reading glasses trained on a collection of papers she was holding, and was muttering something to herself as she read. She started to walk towards the flight of stairs going down, reaching for the handrail without looking up.

Emily followed with her knees bent and breathing measured. When she got close enough, she unhooked the key from her belt and held completely still with her lips pressed together. As the Madame continued down the stairs none the wiser, she padded back up to the balcony, without her socked feet betraying her.

She looked both ways before she slotted the key into the lock of the room upstairs, and the door swung open with a slight creak. She held her breath, but it was lost in the noises of the house and the music drifting faintly up from downstairs.

Madame Prudence’s bedroom was much more lavish than any of her courtesans’. The bedspread had a pretty pattern and the mirror on the vanity was uncracked and clean. There was a wardrobe full of fine clothes that looked actually tasteful – Emily wondered if it was Madame Prudence’s excessive make-up that made her clothes look tacky, or perhaps her surroundings.

There was a money pouch and some loose coin on the shelf, and she hesitated a moment before pocketing it. She had directed the Heart’s secret-piercing eyes at a lot of the courtesans in the last couple of hours. She could think of a few coin pouches to slip these into.

Her main reason for coming in here was mounted on the wall, however. It was singing a strange kind of song, like whalesong if it was filtered through the loudspeakers in the Square. It was a three-pronged charm made of bone, and the Heart pumped faster in her pocket as she got close. She pulled one of the chairs over to the fireplace and stood on it to take the charm from its mount.

“Um… What do I do with it?” she asked.

_"A man is only as common as his dreams."_

Emily groaned. “Corvo…” His bouts of random poetry were a little frustrating. Especially since he only seemed to do it when something was very important.

The charm had a little hook on it, and she decided to try and fasten it to her belt loop, where she could easily hide it under her jacket and blouse. With that done, she closed the door of the bedroom and locked it again.

She weighed the key in her palm and considered it. It was all she needed to unlock the VIP entrance and get out of here for good. She remembered Madame Prudence’s hand, vice-like around her arm, and how the lock clicking shut had felt like her eternal imprisonment closing around her. She had new pathways now – jumps she couldn’t make before and windows that had once been too high to reach.

Very quietly, she placed the key down on the floor outside of the Madame’s office, as if she had dropped it, and returned upstairs.

She made her next destination the dormitories, and checked quickly that Violetta had finished tidying it before she crept inside. The beds that were lined up against the wall were indistinguishable, but Emily first looked for the ragdoll hidden under one of the mattresses.

The Heart had told her that Betty kept it under her bed, a relic from her childhood. It had also told her that she was short on coin for plague elixir, and without it she would die within the week.

The Void held all kinds of secrets that the Heart was eager to share. Some of them were so far nestled into the holder that they were imperceptible. Others could be seen, fleetingly, on the surface.

“What do you see in me?” she had asked it.

She longed for Corvo to tell her that he saw her. She could imagine his words, and the old nickname from o-so-long-ago: _“I see a little sparrow listening to secrets on the breeze.”_

Instead the Heart had beat. _Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum._

Violetta was asleep at the far end of the room. Emily slipped a gold coin into her pocket, and moved on to the desk, where there was piece of flat whale bone singing. It was decorated with a circular symbol that matched the one burned into her own skin, and she ran her hand over it, feeling the indents of the carving. She felt some kind of energy channelling into her fingertips, and when she took it into both hands, they went a little numb.

The rune’s song and the Heart’s beating filled her ears and pushed against the inside of her skull. It became louder and louder, until a tingling sensation filled her entire body. Unable to bear it any longer, she dropped the bone while she closed her eyes and covered her ears. As soon as she did, both sounds subsided, leaving Violetta’s snoring as the dominant music in the room.

The Heart’s beats had shifted again to long intervals, longer than she’d heard them before. It seemed to be resting, and the rune on the table had lost its hum. Instead, its power seemed to wait, static, underneath her fingertips.

“Ellie? Are you in here?” called one of the girls, and Emily froze.

She wasn’t expressly forbidden from entering the courtesans’ dormitories, but the girls sometimes yelled at her to get out when she cracked open the door, and they would definitely ask her what she was doing with the rune, a heretical artefact. It was only here in the first place because it had washed up beneath the sewer grate downstairs, and Dolly had decided to try and sell it on the black market.

But Constance’s eyes didn’t settle on Emily, with her shoulders drawn in guiltily as she stood in front of a rune. She was looking above her head, and asked, “Dolly, you haven’t seen Ellie around, have you?”

Emily looked up. She saw a shimmering image, like a reflection on water, of a girl twice her age with dark skin and corkscrew hair, her feet overlapping with Emily’s.

“Uh,” she said, and Dolly’s deeper, adult voice came out. “It’s… Emily.”

“Emily, right. Drat, I keep forgetting,” she cursed herself. “You haven’t seen her?”

“No,” Dolly said, convincingly. “Not all day.”

Constance huffed in distress and left the room. Emily felt the image release, and stared at her hands as if she should be able to see the raw power there. The only clue was the Mark, receding back to its black state.

A slow smile overcame her, and she took the Heart into her hand. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

_“The ships are haunted by whalesong.”_

Emily was not allowed in the parlour, but there were other people that were. She would have to be careful; some experimenting revealed that her illusions did not last for very long, and as the Heart informed her, the courtesans were dressed to draw the attention of the coin in the room.

Something Corvo had struggled to teach her was subtlety. She had once watched him fall into step with a troop of City Watch officers patrolling the Tower, and Captain Curnow had spotted Emily watching them before he’d seen that he was leading an extra set of feet.

It was harder not to be noticed as a Princess, smaller than the rest and dressed in white. But there was a high ledge running around the main hall in the second floor, just wide enough for her to crouch on, and nothing but rats was expected to be able to climb up there.

The plan had been simple at first. Custis and Morgan, those twins with the sour faces, were practically begging to have the daylights scared out of them. A minimal amount of hanging around where she shouldn’t had revealed that Custis liked to wait in one of the soundproof rooms and talk to the courtesans, while Morgan preferred to be surrounded by people in the steam room.

Both presented their own challenges, but Emily thought she had probably cracked the best approach. In the crowded steam room, it would be easy for her to create whispers that fed Morgan’s paranoia. He was so worried that his brothers, or even his “wretched half-sister,” would try to steal his inheritance.

Custis, meanwhile, needed a more direct approach. She hadn’t worked out all the details, but she was in the process of spying from the rafters when she saw the Madame chasing two girls up the stairs with three claps of her hands.

“Go!” she snapped. “Be ready in five minutes, or so help me you will be walking the streets in your underwear.”

Lydia and Penny hurried up the next flight of stairs with their clothes bundled in their arms. Lydia’s face was smeared with lipstick, and Penny’s cheeks were stained with tears.

“Nobody’s paying you to suck on each other’s lips, certainly not me,” the Madame yelled after them from the landing. “A coin’ll be docked off your wages for every minute you spend so much as glancing at each other for the next week.”

When the door to the dorms closed upstairs, Madame Prudence straightened her jacket and huffed, sending a stray lock of hair floating upwards. As she fixed her towering orange hairdo with her gnarled old fingers, she muttered to herself.

“All the boys stiff from the plague, half the girls sneaking off and smacking lips on the clock. What’s happening to this place? Pull it together, Prudence. Campbell is expecting a high class establishment this evening, and that’s what he’s getting.”

At the mention of his name, Emily remembered the High Overseer’s dull old voice echoing in the Void. She had played the words over, time and time again, the way they were strung together like a play. Campbell and the Spymaster had rehearsed those lines. And then…

“Regretfully, our _esteemed guest_ down at Coldridge Prison expired this morning. It seems the Royal Interrogator was a little too enthusiastic in his persuasive methods.”

Campbell had known Corvo was hurting, and he had let him. He’d made it happen.

Emily had a new target.

“What do you think?” she asked the Heart, on her final rehearsal.

_“The black-eyed man hides in the dreams of believers and non-believers alike.”_

She heard footsteps on the stairs and jumped down onto the landing – softened by wingbeats – while Marissa was looking at her feet. When she caught her attention, she said, “Oh!” in surprise. “I didn’t see you there, er, sweetie. I swear you just appear out of thin air sometimes.”

“The Madame is looking for you,” Emily conveyed.

Marissa frowned. “What? What for? I’m supposed to be in the Gold Room waiting for a client…”

“Sasha is covering for you,” she said, and pushed on her elbow to get her to turn around before she could think about that too much. “You’ve gotta go, right now.”

She pressed her fingers into her back, and she started walking back down the stairs. “Oh, al—alright, well…”

As soon as Marissa was confusedly on her way to find the Madame (who, coincidentally, was on one of her lengthy smoke breaks on the roof), Emily dashed into the Gold Room.

This was the first time she had got more than a quick glance at it. It was round, like all of the “business rooms,” with a huge circular bed in the centre. There were windows circling it, showing a view of the Wrenhaven River, and a door that opened onto a balcony – obscured from the bed by a partition.

It was perfect.

When Campbell opened the door to the Gold Room, he let out a low chuckle, the likes of which Emily would never have suspected such a joyless man to be capable of. “What’s this?” he said, with a hint of intrigue. She gagged.

The windows were covered by drapes, throwing the room into shadow. It was already dark outside, but without the city lantern lights glowing from a distance, everything seemed darker and more enclosed. Barely more was visible than the shiny golden pattern glinting on the bedspread, and the faint outlines of the shapes in the room.

“Where are you hiding?” Campbell asked, beginning to circle the room. His playfulness faded from his next word, leaving concern. “Hello?”

Emily felt the Mark itch on the back of her hand as she conjured her masterpiece; a tall, well-dressed young man with cavernous pits where his eyes should be. His arms were just a little bit too long, and the light didn’t fall on his face like it should, as if he was being Iit from another dimension. He spoke in a voice that seemed to bend the air around him: “Hello, High Overseer.”

Campbell stumbled on his feet, away from the apparition. “What the devil—” he sputtered. “What kind of trickery is this?”

“I have a great many tricks, but this is not one among them,” proclaimed the man. He paced back and forth with his hands behind his back, and Campbell maintained the distance between them. “I am the Outsider, and I’ve become very interested in you.”

“In me?” he said, aghast. He seemed to find his footing a little. “Why—what could you possibly gain from a man of devout faith such as myself? You will not coax me into the dark, leviathan.”

“I see into your heart, Thaddeus,” the Outsider told him.

_"He breaks all Seven Strictures each day. He finds it funny. His own little joke."_

“I know what you really think of the Strictures. Did they bore you, I wonder? What makes a man turn on his faith? Perhaps you were just curious about what was waiting for you in the dark.” The illusion levitated himself over the bed to advance directly into Campbell’s face.

The High Overseer leaned away from him in horror, and then, with a whimper, scrambled backwards and ran towards the double doors. It was locked, with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign lit, and he fumbled cluelessly with the handle. When that didn’t work, he pounded on the door with his fist and shouted, threatened, _screamed_ that he be let out of here at once.

“You’re in my domain now,” the Outsider whispered in his ear, suddenly appearing behind him from out of the shadows themselves.

Campbell flattened his back against the door and slipped down it. “What do you want from me?!” he sobbed.

He smiled, black eyes gleaming, and vanished from sight. As Campbell got hesitantly to his feet, Emily threw voice and shadow around the room. He spun at each twitch in the corner of his eye, each syllable echoing around the chamber.

“I want you to get on a boat and leave Dunwall forever.”

“Yes, fine,” he answered immediately. “Consider me gone.”

There was a slight pause, where his consideration could be heard clearly. “No, in fact, leave Gristol altogether.”

“Whatever you want,” he said hastily.

The Outsider hummed. “You know, I’m not sure there’s room in the Isles for a stinking, ugly, corrupt, treasonous sack of shit like you. Maybe I should send you further.”

Emily felt a small thrill at being able to use a swear. She’d been saving it up for months and months, ever since she’d overheard one of the Watchmen around the Cat muttering to himself.

Campbell struggled for a place to leave his eyes. He was looking all around the room in search of the voice’s source, and seeing nothing but stretches of darkness and the outline of a place he knew. “But… there’s nothing living out beyond the Isles,” he stammered.

He rose out of the shadows to lean his face in close to Campbell’s. The whalesong rose in volume and urgency. “You said whatever I want. I want you to roam the Pandyssian wastes. Find the ruins of temples and shrines built in my honour, and try to stave off the madness that you have invited on yourself.”

“…Yes,” Campbell said, quaking. “I understand.”

The Outsider turned his back on him. “Leave immediately,” he instructed. “Tell no one you are going.”

Emily flipped the switch that unlocked the door and turned off the ‘Do Not Disturb’ light. “Oh, and Thaddeus,” she mouthed, and the illusion mimicked her words with a lighthearted tone that quickly turned dark.

“Know that if you step one foot in the Empire again, I will know. My wrath will not be immediate. It will not be expected. But when the time comes, I will pull you into the Void, where you can spend the rest of your eternity.”

Campbell fumbled for the doorhandle, and stared for a few extra moments at the spot where the Outsider’s eyes had been after he vanished again, this time taking the unsettling noise of the Void with him.

As the door opened, Emily heard another voice, a courtesan’s: “Oh! Beg your pardon, sir, but I saw the light was on and I wondered who was in there with you on account of, well, you see, I was told Sasha was taking you today but that would’ve been mighty strange considering Sasha died six weeks back, and—Goodness, sir, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, are—"

She could only assume that the sound she heard next was the sound of Campbell fleeing the scene, as it sounded like heavy boots and several voices calling after him.

Marissa poked her head into the room, where the curtains were closed, but otherwise was totally normal. She closed the door again, and Emily propelled herself across the room to the balcony door. The Madame had already descended back down the stairs from her smoke break, and presumably was now dealing with the commotion that Campbell’s hasty exit had caused.

Emily slipped into her bedroom, and rearranged the pillows that she had stuffed under a blanket so that she could lie on them comfortably.

_“At the docks, a boat waits. It takes desperate people to places far away. The High Overseer has plenty of coin to spare.”_

She giggled and held the Heart close to her chest, letting its regular beating lull her to sleep.


	3. Tugging on Heartstrings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emily is about fed up of being held at the Golden Cat by the corrupt, aristocratic Pendleton brothers. These twins are loyal to the tyrannical Lord Regent, but more importantly, they're easy targets for a ten-year-old with a proficiency at sneaking and artistic rapport.

Her captors hadn’t let her listen to the announcements when she first arrived at the Golden Cat. She had only caught part of one clearly, stating that the former Royal Protector Corvo Attano was awaiting trial for the murder of…

“You don’t want to listen to that dreary talk,” Madame Prudence had insisted, pulling her away from the window.

She was nowhere in sight now, as Emily listened for the announcement she was waiting for. After notices about infected districts and plague protocol and the jurisdiction of the City Watch, it came: "Attention, Dunwall Citizens: Anyone with information pertaining to the disappearance of High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell is to report to the City Watch for immediate questioning.”

Emily grinned.

“In this time of spiritual crisis, the Overseers have initiated the Feast of Painted Kettles until a new High Overseer is chosen.”

With a flourish, she finished colouring in ex-Overseer Campbell’s red jacket on her drawing. She had given him big, sad eyes because his usual scowl hadn’t been cutting it. Floating beside his ear was the smug-looking Outsider, all black and white, proud of his work.

Just as she was about to take out the Heart and ask Corvo what he thought, one of the Pendleton twins stormed into the room, brandishing a collection of papers. His face was very red.

“What is the meaning of this?!” he demanded, shaking the papers in his hand. She could see the one on the top of the pile – one of her finest pieces of work. It told a full story.

Emily looked Custis in the eyes and answered, “It’s the Story of the Fancy-Dressed Lady and the Naked Man.”

His cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of red, and his lip quivered. “And _what_ , praytell,” he hissed, “was it doing hanging on the wall of the Ivory Room along with the rest of these atrocities.”

He did not say it like a question.

Half an hour ago, Emily had snuck into the Ivory Room and tacked up a whole gallery of drawings on the walls. All were based on true events and real people that she had observed within the walls of the Golden Cat, or been told about by the Heart. The fine selection of works for this particular exhibit had a consistent theme – Custis Pendleton.

“I thought you would like them,” she lied.

“You insolent brat,” he sneered. He took the drawings in both hands and tore the entire pile in two. Emily cringed. She had expected some of those drawings to be destroyed, but she had spent a lot of time on them. Particularly the one depicting Corvo throwing Custis out of the Commissioners’ Ball after he made a rude remark to the Empress.

With the torn paper scattering dramatically onto the floor, the man leaned in with his horrible sour face and said, “If you think you can get away with this just because you’re that wretched wench’s daughter, you are sorely mistaken.”

She had intended to keep her cool, but her face went hot when he insulted her mother. She opened her mouth to retaliate, but just then, Morgan stalked into the room with daggers in his eyes.

“You rotten hagfish,” he spat at his brother. “I always knew you were a traitorous shicer.”

“Whatever you think I did, you’re wrong,” Custis snapped back, barely even turning his full attention. “You’ve let those gossiping wagtails get in your empty head again.”

He grabbed Emily’s arm and yanked her upwards. Her feet left the floor for a moment, and she yelled at him to let go, but he only tightened his grip. “You’re coming with me to learn some manners.”

The Heart thumped in her pocket, just as fast as her own.

_"He was raised to believe the world is but a toy for him to play with."_

Desperate to get out of his clutches, she called on the Mark. Her hand illuminated with power, and she felt a familiar tug on her soul. Her eyes were drawn to Morgan, standing behind his brother and seething.

A flame flashed in his eyes, and armed with a furious scowl, he slapped a hand on his twin’s shoulder and pulled him around to face him. Before Custis could ask him what he thought he was doing, Morgan punched him squarely in the face.

Custis said a lot of words that Emily planned to make a special note of later. He had released her arm in the shock as he stumbled, and now had fully turned to Morgan.

“What was that for, you pillock?” he said.

Morgan shook his left hand out, and then cradled his thumb with the other. Emily hadn’t seen in the speed of the moment, but if she’d been asked for her best guess, she would have said that he had foolishly balled up his fist with his thumb inside it, and it had broken on impact.

Mother had been so cross with Corvo when she found out he’d taught her how to throw a punch. It was a good thing she’d never seen him demonstrating how to throw someone twice her size over her head.

“It was for stealing my inheritance, you filthy rat,” Morgan sniffed. He craned his neck. “I know you paid off that crook Bunting to lie about its value.”

“I did nothing of the fucking sort,” he replied, dabbing at his lip with his fingers. It was spilling with blood, and despite his efforts, dripping onto his clothes. “If anyone is trying to cheat you out of anything, it’ll be Treavor.”

He scoffed, unimpressed with this answer. “That miserable lout doesn’t have the spine to try something like this. It can only be you, you jealous braggart.”

Custis graciously returned the punch his brother had given him. In fact, he employed even more care, keeping his thumb positioned correctly outside of the fist across his knuckles. It connected with Morgan’s nose, receiving the gift with a grateful _crunch_. As he staggered backwards, blood dripped off his hand, which cupped the wound.

The twins began to wrestle, blood quickly making a mask over the mouths and chins of both of their faces. Emily felt invisible in the room, and she edged backwards towards the window. The loudspeakers blasted on:

"Attention, Dunwall Citizens: You are required to boil any water from public fountains or the river. Anyone who has consumed untreated water must be reported to the Watch."

Custis and Morgan were grunting insults at each other as they fought, each trying to conceal that they were struggling for breath.

“I wish I _had_ stolen the damn inheritance,” Custis said, through gritted teeth. “Having to share my entire life with _you_ … has been—”

He didn’t get to finish his remark, because Morgan, pinned down, had groped around for an object in his reach, and when his hand closed around something, he slammed it into the side of his brother’s head. The vase shattered, and Custis’ hold loosened. It didn’t matter much.

His knife was already nestled comfortably between Morgan’s ribs.

“You bitch,” Morgan cursed in obvious pain, his hands hovering over the knife handle uncertainly. “You utter, vile, accursed…”

It was here that he realised that his brother had stopped hurling insults at him. He was limp on the wooden floor, and from his temple trickled a trail of blood. “Custis?” he asked, a wobble in his voice. Whether it was for the knife in his chest or the absence of his twin’s breath, no one would ever know. With one more cough of his name, this time laced with blood, Morgan collapsed as well.

Emily stayed absolutely still. She stayed like that for another two loudspeaker announcements that she didn’t listen to.

Footsteps came down the hallway. Loulia’s voice joined them: “Have those two brothers stopped squabbling y—”

Her scream shook the building to its foundations.

As Emily sat on the countertop in the dressing room, she recounted the next events as if they had happened to someone else. Loulia’s scream had attracted more of the girls, and eventually the Madame.

Constance had toed around the blood and sprawling bodies to the child that stood quivering at the edge of the room with splatters of blood on her tights.

At being touched, the girl lashed out and screamed for her mother. She fought against the assassins she was sure had come to take her. She pushed and struggled until her energy was spent, and then she went limp and sobbed. She longed for her mother’s gentle voice. She longed for her father’s gentle smile. She longed for the gentleness that had so long been lost to her, stroking her hair or kissing her forehead.

There was a big blank gap after that. She supposed she must have been led out of the room. Past the Pendletons’ ghastly white faces, down the stairs, and into the dressing room. She supposed she must have taken off her shoes and shorts so that her tights could have the pinkish stains soaked out of them in the basin that was sitting on the table. All of her clothes had come off except her blouse and her underwear. They had felt dirty.

“Please try and eat something, sweetheart,” Violetta said. “Look, Mr. Smith brought another one of those baskets. Better get in at the good sweets quick before the other girls find it.”

Emily just stared ahead at the basin with her swilling clothes. She wanted Corvo’s voice, his _real_ voice with all the parts you couldn’t hear, and the Heart seemed to know that it was not a fit replacement because it stayed quiet in her hand, invisible to the courtesans.

_Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum._

“Look at you, shivering away,” Violetta tutted one minute, and for whatever reason, that broke her out of her trance. She felt suddenly awake and in the room.

“I’m gonna go and track down some clean clothes for you, young lady. Are you going to be alright down here by yourself?”

Emily nodded. As she left the room, she heard a surprised, “Oh!” and a, “Pardon me, ma’am.”

“What are you doing down here?” Madame Prudence asked. She sounded especially nasally and leering today. “Why aren’t you scrubbing the place down like the others? I want this establishment spotless by sun-up tomorrow, we can’t let this unpleasantness tarnish our good reputation. The plague’s kept this place closed enough recently.”

“I’m just fetching some clean clothes for Emily, ma’am. The poor mite is going to shiver herself to death,” Violetta replied.

The Madame huffed. “Leave her. Without those rotten brothers paying for her, I can’t keep her here. She’s not our responsibility any longer.”

She fumbled with her protest for a moment before blurting, “She’s just a child!”

“A very _expensive_ child,” she scorned, “and unless you want your wages docked for every penny I spend on that brat, you’ll keep your trap shut.”

Violetta murmured a reluctant compliance and let herself be ushered up the stairs to assist the others.

_“The girls do not like this new Madame. She is not kind. Not at all like the old one."_

Emily needed to leave, and she needed to do it now.

Moving around the Golden Cat was even easier without the patrons to avoid. The only people left in the house were the courtesans, the Madame, and a small collection of City Watchers who were more interested in chatting up the girls than dealing with the corpses propped by the front door for their collection.

The Pendletons’ bodies were not tossed unceremoniously into the river, as the plague dead were. They were bound up in white sheets and left for the Watch to collect on their rounds with the cart. These two nobles and their fate had been properly reported to the authorities; not like Sasha. Not like Craig or Billy or Gareth, or any of the ones who had hidden bleeding eyes until their words slurred together and they only breathed to cough.

Some of the girls were sent out to “work the streets” but most stayed in, cleaning. Betty and Penny were viciously scrubbing the floor of the boys’ dormitory when Emily padded across the landing to her bedroom. The dorms were nowhere near the blood spilled tonight, but the Madame had decided that if the Cat was going to be closed – and it was, according to the Watch officers who were conducting their “investigation” – she was going to finish ridding the place of plague at the same time.

“You ask me, the kid’s lucky Prudie isn’t making her earn her keep. She’s better off out there, at her age,” Betty said, resting between bouts of scouring.

Penny whined. “I know that. But it isn’t fair. She could surely do other things around the house – cleaning, suturing, that sort of stuff. Why’s the Madame so eager to turn her out?”

She sighed and shrugged. “It really ain’t any of our business, Pen. We ought’a keep ourselves to ourselves and let the Madame do what the Madame does.” She kept on scrubbing for a second, and then from the end of her tongue reluctantly rolled, “But…”

“But what?”

“But maybe those freaky twins were holding a hot potato with Emily and old Prudie isn’t too keen to get her fingers burned.” Then she added, after a moment of eye contact with her colleague, “It’s nothing. Never mind it.”

She slipped into her bedroom. She didn’t have many belongings with her, here; all her toys, including her favourite doll, Mrs. Pilsen, were abandoned somewhere in Dunwall Tower. She had a stolen pouch of coins under her pillow, which she hooked onto her belt along with her single bone charm – she had discovered that it made her footsteps quieter. She also had her pencils, and she swithered on whether she should try to keep them in her pocket.

She had to be practical: when running and jumping, they could fall out and make a noise. With reluctance, she left her drawing materials behind.

The only other thing she took was a picture that she had pinned on her wall of herself, Corvo, and her mother riding a whale. They were flying up, up, away from Dunwall. Away from all the blood and sickness and men with steel blades. She folded up the paper carefully and slipped it into the pocket of her blouse.

All that was left was to take the key from Madame Prudence’s belt, and she could be out of here before she was moved to a new “safe place” by the Spymaster. All she had to do was wait for her to leave her office when the Watch officer knocked, informing her that they were done with their investigative business and would be leaving shortly.

After Emily had lifted the key and was about to make her way back downstairs as fast as she could, she heard a man’s voice far too close and tensed.

“What the hell’s a kid doing in here?”

They were talking about her as if she wasn’t in earshot. As if she couldn’t see them staring at her, frozen on the landing outside the Madame’s office.

“What do you think she’s doing here?” the other officer said, passively. She sounded bored. “We’re in a club where the staff have sex for a living. You don’t need me to explain where babies come from, right Jenkins?”

“Blow off,” he grunted, and then tipped his chin at Emily and raised his voice as if she couldn’t hear him perfectly well before. “Go on upstairs, young lady. Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

She took the excuse to leave without a word. She would need to find another way downstairs, but with her powers, that was okay.

The powers. She kept biting her lip and clenching her teeth thinking about them, and she could hear the faint influence of her governesses in the back of her mind, telling her it was unbecoming to make such unpleasant faces. But she couldn’t stop remembering the flame that had lit up in Morgan’s eyes…

She bumped into a body on the second floor landing, lost in her own thoughts.

“Watch where you’re going,” he said, cross.

“It wasn’t my fault!” she shouted, and when she saw his look of surprise, she ran up the next flight of stairs, to the dormitories. Emily’s breathing was proving hard to reign in, and her heartbeat was just as fast as the one in her pocket. She closed her hand around it.

_“Where am I? What’s happened to me?”_

With the key firmly grasped in her other hand, she got out onto the roof. There was a path she could take over the tops of the roofs, but was feeling to shaky to make the jump to the next building over. It was dark, and she didn’t want to fall. Instead, she jumped onto one of the balconies on the same floor as the parlour, and crept down the stairs.

As she approached, she overheard two of the courtesans talking in the dressing room. She guessed that they had just come off the streets and were about to go back out, because Dolly was re-applying her make-up in the mirror and Marissa was trying to eat something without smudging her lipstick.

Emily seemed to be the only topic of discussion in the Golden Cat tonight. “But doesn’t she have other family to go to?” Marissa asked. “The Pendletons have another brother, don’t they?”

“You think they’re family?” Dolly stepped further back into a different question.

She frowned. “Sure. Why else would she be here?”

“I don’t wanna know.” She widened her eyes to thicken her already strong coat of mascara. “The way they secreted her away, I’d wager she wasn’t welcome around the estate. Maybe she’s one of their bastards, or something.”

There was a lull in the conversation where she was clearly considering something. “You don’t think…” she started, and then trailed off. Following an expectant look from Marissa, she continued, “You don’t think she really is the Princess, do you?”

Emily heard a snort. “ _What_?” she laughed. “You’re not serious.”

“Do you remember when she first arrived? She said it all the time. ‘I’m Lady Emily, heir to the throne.’ ‘I command you by order of the Princess,’ all that nonsense.”

“That was just kid stuff,” she said. “That other brother of theirs, I forget his name. He’s only been here once or twice, but he told me piss-drunk that he was distantly related to the Royal Family. Our Emily probably found out she was related to the crown by half a hair and thought it meant she’d be the Empress one day.”

Dolly was quiet. She kept applying her make-up, sombre. Emily was about to sneak on down the stairs towards the VIP exit, but then she spoke again.

“I heard her crying out in her sleep once. I swear on every coin in my purse, she said the name ‘Corvo.’”

Marissa said nothing. Emily clenched her teeth and moved on.

The door was in sight. She almost felt like breaking out into a run, her heart beating fast. She was eager to be out of here, finally, to not have the Pendletons or Campbell or the Madame looming over her anymore—

“Ellie,” whispered a voice, and she almost squealed.

Constance put a finger to her lips and shushed, and beckoned Emily into the alcove underneath the stairs of the lowest floor of the Golden Cat. “I thought I’d catch you down here,” she said.

“You can’t stop me,” she scowled, and made herself ready to run for it. If she was quick, she could open the door and lock it from the other side before she could catch up.

She sighed and picked up some dark square of something from near her feet. “I know.” She unfolded the object to reveal a navy blue sweater, which she then pulled over Emily’s head. Since it was her only option, she squirmed her arms through.

“Put these on,” she instructed, holding a pair of dark grey, pocket-laden trousers for her to stick her legs through.

Complying, she asked where she had got these clothes. Since staying at the Golden Cat, Emily had only worn a small selection of outfits. The only one that had fit her right was the one she had arrived in, but these were items she had never seen before.

“They were my son’s,” Constance answered, turning up the collar of the warm, woollen coat after sliding it onto her shoulders. Her tone didn’t leave any room for questions, but the Heart answered them silently, in her mind.

_“When he died, blood crusted round his eyes, she felt relief. It only made her feel more guilty.”_

Emily looked at the thin trimming of gold-coloured thread that went around the edges of the coat. Somebody had spent a lot of time on it. “It’s nice,” she said.

“Yeah,” Constance chuckled fondly. “My ma spoiled that boy rotten.”

The last thing she presented her with was a misshapen paper parcel tied with string. It was a small package of food and two vials of Sokolov’s elixir.

“But you need that,” Emily protested.

“Trust me, you need it more,” she said. She would not be swayed on this issue – she was using a Mother voice. It quickly softened when she added, “I’m sorry I can’t do more for you.”

She dived into Constance head-first. Her arms closed around her, and she squeezed back, tight and warm. She stained the shoulder of her shirt with tears, but Constance didn’t seem to mind. She rubbed Emily’s back and made soft, reassuring shushing sounds.

When the noise subsided, Emily stepped back and swiped the snot from her nose, feeling silly. Only little kids cried, and she had to be grown up now. She was going to be on her own.

All on her own.

“Oh, shoot,” Constance said suddenly. “I got your name wrong again. I’m sorry. Be safe out there, Emily. Please.”

She was suddenly very, very reluctant to leave the Golden Cat, but it wouldn’t be long before someone realised she wasn’t in her room and that Madame Prudence’s key was missing. She’d already made her choice. Constance started back up the stairs before anybody missed her, and she was left to turn the handle alone. She took a deep breath and nodded to herself.

As closed the door to the VIP entrance behind her, and was greeted by an announcement on the loudspeakers:

"The Lord Regent would like to remind us all that curfews will be enforced without exception. Citizens on the streets after curfew will be treated as hostile. The Lord Regent bids each and every citizen of Dunwall a pleasant night."


	4. Street Rat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emily is now free from her captors, and out in the dangers of Dunwall. There’s plague, rats, and sinister types lurking around every corner – she could do with a friend.

The VIP entrance of the Golden Cat did not look like it entertained important people very often. It was run-down, with loose rock strewn all over the floor and wood panelling slapped over crumbling infrastructure and disused archways.

Curiously, despite the mess, there was a lit closed stove that looked as if it had been scraped across the flagstones and left there. As well as that, there was a workbench with a vice and scraps of some unfamiliar material. Just as Emily was about to get a closer look, she heard two voices.

One was humming a melody indistinctly. The other was screaming.

“Heeeeelp!” he wailed. “Someone help meeeeeeee!”

Emily looked around hurriedly and jumped up, using her wingbeats to get onto a thick piece of piping hugging the walls of the building. She watched a tall, grey-haired woman drag a man twice her width across the muddy ground as he sobbed.

“Hush now, dearie,” she cooed. “Granny’s got to concentrate. Don’t go anywhere, now.”

She walked over to the workbench, holding her hands close to her chest. Her captive didn’t flee; his leg was broken in at least two places and he was far too hysterical to think about much of anything other than screaming.

“Slackjawww! Heeeeelp!”

The woman made some beckoning motions and out of crevices in the walls and hideaways under the décor came the rats. They were huge and scruffy, with monstrous faces – Emily knew because one of the things scurried of out of a hole in the wall and onto her pipe. Luckily, it seemed to be too busy being drawn to the lady to pay her any mind.

“Now, he’s not for you, my little birdies,” she told them sternly. “Not just yet anyway. I’ve got to carve his bones out for my beloved. You can have all the fleshy chunks when I’m done.”

“Please,” blubbered her victim, “please, Granny Rags, don’t. Slackjaw can make you rich, don’cha know? Maybe we can come to some sorta, sorta arrangement?”

Granny Rags tittered. “What a silly little man you are. Money won’t do me any good, no, no good at all. Stop all that noise, will you? Granny is working.”

When he continued to wail and splutter, she grew visibly irritated. The rats squeaked at her feet as they skittered in amongst one another, and she looked down at them as if she could hear what they were saying. “Oh, go on then, my pretties. Just a little nibble, and then I really must keep the rest of him.

If Emily didn’t know better, she’d have thought she could hear a triumphant chorus of chirps from the swarm. They quickly refocused their efforts from fussing about Granny Rags’ feet to devouring the unbroken leg of her prisoner. He screamed even louder than before as the blood began to spurt and spray all over the ground, and then he passed out. The rats, having eaten their fill, disappeared back into the woodwork.

Emily thought it would be best if she got out of here very quickly. Still crouched on the piping, she stepped in the direction of the cool air draught blowing into the lair.

“Who’s that?” Granny Rags asked. Her tone was sweet, almost sickly, and it made her skin crawl. “Is that you, dearie? Your footsteps are ever so quiet…”

Her voice turned much darker and more harsh as she finished, “but I can hear you breathing.”

She held her breath. The old woman tilted her head back and forth, shuffling her feet around in a circle. Even from a distance, Emily could see that her eyes were clouded with white. She was blind – but with very keen ears. After a few moments of listening, she shrugged and went back to her work.

The Heart thudded. Corvo’s voice came as a warning: _“She speaks things that should not be spoken."_

“Which story would you like, pet?” she asked, sounding sweet again. “The history of the great city of Dunwall? No, no, that’s not for you. No.” After a moment of deciding, she said, “You want the tale of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin!”

Emily breathed in sharply at the mention of her mother’s name. This seemed to please Granny Rags, putting an unsettling smile on her face. “Regal, fair-minded, she brought prosperity to the city, hope to all, then violently murdered these six months ago!

“Nothing’s been the same since her death! Poor child! But here’s the worst part – it was a man she trusted over all others that did the deed! Ha, ha! And then my Morris stopped his heart… What a bright young man he’s turned out to be,” she sang.

“That story isn’t true!” Emily exclaimed, unable to stop herself. Her cheeks burned at the accusation that Corvo, _her_ Corvo, would ever do anything to hurt her mother. “You don’t know _anything_. You’re just a stupid old lady.”

“Oh?” she said. “You’re just a little one, aren’t you? Run along, little sparrow. Granny has work to do.”

She felt a piercing pain in her chest. It was no black magic trick; just the mention of her old nickname, coming from a wicked tongue. Maybe she should stop wishing for things. They never seemed to come true in the way that she wanted.

Emily hurried from the alley and had to jump down onto the ground. It was dark, but she could see two people shambling around in the road – probably plague-sick. Weepers, they were called, according to the Watch officers that liked to hang around the Golden Cat.

The people didn’t seem to be aware of their surroundings. They coughed and groaned with blood running from their eyes as stray rats danced around their feet, waiting for them to fall, waiting for them to stop wheezing, so they could feast.

_“So many of them now. It was not always like this.”_

She wasn’t sure if the Heart meant the weepers, or the rats.

Feeling exposed, Emily beat her wings to get up onto a high beam between two buildings, and from there, another set of pipes.

The cold night wind ran a chill through her, and she pulled the hood of her new coat over her ears. She needed to find somewhere sheltered to spend the night, away from the weepers and the Watch and Granny Rags. As she walked along the pipes – each foot carefully placed – she was lead to a rooftop. A hop, a skip, and a jump away was a doorless frame ten feet above the ground.

She used her powers to get in, and was immediately hit with the stench. The whole district seemed to stink of smoke, plague and alcohol, but this one room was putrid beyond understanding. There were bodies on the floor, in amongst the rat droppings, and rotting fruit on the table. The door to the interior stairs had been barricaded, but there were three openings to the outside, and the wind blew through the place in a swirling vortex.

It was not an ideal place to spend the night.

“Did you get it?”

There were voices coming from down the street.

“I got a vial and a half,” said a woman, with a voice just as rough as the first.

“Hey, I told you to get enough for me as well. Slackjaw ain’t gonna accept a measly little haul like that.”

“He will if I tell him I got it solo. Which I did.”

The first voice took a hostile tone. “That wasn’t our deal,” he said.

“It’s not my fault the lousy guard that came by hadn’t picked up his refill yet,” the woman snapped. “I’ve stood out in the cold long enough. I’m coming into the distillery to get warm.”

“What am I supposed to do?” demanded the man.

The woman didn’t sound like she cared. “I don’t know, Larry. Go fuck yourself?”

Emily heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and then Larry’s gruff muttering. He scuffed his boots on the ground and then set off walking down the way with his hands in his pockets. She craned her neck around to check the coast was clear and then jumped down into the street. The sign above the door was lit up with lanterns and read:

DUNWALL WHISKEY DISTILLERY

The courtyard of the distillery was still open to the elements, and the sheltered spots were crowded with folk. She pushed on to the distillery itself – there had to be a dry corner in there she could curl up in. All she had to do was edge along the pipes overhead, and swipe the key from the table next to the door.

To her dismay, there were more people inside the distillery. Their gossip didn’t seem a far cry from the sort of stuff she had overheard at the Golden Cat, and they all seemed relatively laid-back because their boss, this guy named Slackjaw that Emily had been hearing about, was away.

There was a sort of office near the entrance to the distillery, and she let herself in. There were a couple of boring-looking notes left for Slackjaw, but more importantly there was a sealed-off room adjacent to it, accessible by a hole in the brick wall above the vents.

The crank-wheel that opened the door to the storage closet looked old and loud. If someone used it, the sound would surely wake her up and she could be out of the room before they’d had time to sneeze.

Perfect.

Or as close to perfect as she was going to get.

As she settled into a corner, she took out the parcel that had been tucked into the inside of her coat and unwrapped it. There were two bread rolls, a handful of berries (slightly smushed), and a round, sweet-looking biscuit.

While she nibbled on her food, she watched a rat on the other side of the closet. It had scampered out of a vent tunnel and sniffed around a little before running back and forth in the room. It didn’t come close to Emily – most of the rats in Dunwall were timid, until they were in a group. As long as it didn’t call its friends over, she was safe. She asked the Heart about it, anyway:

_“It was the runt of its litter. It is much too timid to act without its friends.”_

She didn’t finish any of her picnic – she knew she had to make it last. After washing down her meal with a gulp of Sokolov’s elixir (gross), she wrapped everything back into a parcel and curled up, ready to sleep.

Through the night, she was woken many times by loud, rowdy shouts and clanging noises. There wasn’t much light coming into the closet where she was huddled, but she could tell that daylight had started to stream in through the tall windows of the distillery when she heard--

“WATCH THE WIRE!”

“SHIT-!”

A crash, and the shattering of glass.

“You fucking dumbass, Eddie,” snarled a voice, ringing clear in the ensuing silence.

“Sorry, M’linda,” Eddie mumbled, sounding sleepy. “What we even have tripwires round here for…?”

By the sound of it, Melinda cuffed him over the head before she snapped, “To catch intruders, dipshit. The idea’s _supposed_ to be that we all know what’s what around here and don’t set off the fucking traps. Course, that only works if you’re sober.”

As she was talking, Emily climbed up to the hole in the wall to get a look at what was going on. If she couldn’t sleep with all this racket, she might as well take the opportunity to do some snooping.

“‘m totally sober,” he protested. Emily saw him swaying. “Aw, geez. Lemme pick all this up.”

He bent to tend to the broken glass that was littered all around the entrance to the distillery, and Melinda grabbed him by the ear. “Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “I don’t need you drunk _and_ bleeding. Go lie down in one of the bunks and sleep it off, genius.”

“’kay, boss,” he yawned, not seeming to mind the unconventional way he was being lead around.

Emily’s stomach growled. She frowned down at her belly and told it, silently, to shush. It bickered back, and she started to feel nausea rising in her throat. With her frown turning into a scowl, she hopped down to the ground and left the distillery building.

The courtyard was emptier than it had been, at first glance. As she made her way across the courtyard, she amended that observation – everyone was still around, but they were hunkered down in corners or curled up on mattresses under the shelters dotted around the yard. Most looked asleep, but there was a small group playing a card game.

The fire grates, besides the one that people were playing cards around, had extinguished themselves in the night. On top of one of the grates, a skewered rat was abandoned, cold, and Emily reached to take it. As her fingers closed around the stick, someone sat up blearily, and she jumped onto the makeshift platform above the entrance to the yard.

She sat down and examined the rat. It looked ugly and plain, but it had been well-barbequed, and she was hungry, so she tore in. It tasted like chicken – albeit unseasoned chicken. Oh, how she missed the roast dinners they used to serve at home, bursting with flavours…

She swallowed. This would do. It had to.

When she left the distillery, the Heart quivered. Spaced-out beats, but strong ones, and when she took it into her hand, she felt a pull that took her out of Bottle Street and towards the waterfront. Endoria Street.

She could see, further down the road, that there was a checkpoint staffed by dozing Watchers. They weren’t going to catch anybody in a hurry, but that was fine – the Wall of Light would stop anyone that tried to dash onto Clavering Boulevard. There were ones like it around Dunwall Tower; that part of the city was the first to get them, to keep the plague out.

It was also fine because Emily had no reason to go that way. The Heart was pointing her towards a run-down house with an ancient eviction notice on the front door. There was a balcony on the floor above with both doors knocked out, and she got in through there.

The house was dark, and messy. In the room she entered through, there was an upturned rowboat and a pile of stiff, dirty laundry. She used the Mark to light her way downstairs, and the Heart’s beating grew faster. Past the broken furniture, there was a door that opened onto a backalley. At the right-angled turn in the lane, Emily could see purple light.

The Heart was almost feverish as she approached, and when she rounded the corner she saw what could only be described as a shrine. It was an oddly-shaped wooden table, possibly cannibalised from the furniture in the house, with pointed stakes jutting out of the top. The whole thing was wrapped in barbed wire and surrounded by lanterns that made the flames glow purple. In the centre of the shine was a rune, singing its haunting melody – even louder than the one Dolly had found, perhaps amplified by the altar it had been placed on.

Just as she was about to reach out to the rune, a white rat poked its head out from in between the wooden spikes. It sniffed the rune, and then stood on its hind legs and seemed to study Emily.

“You better not be a spy for that Granny Rags,” she warned it.

The rat tilted its head at her inquisitively. It was small and had soft-looking fur, and didn’t have the big sticky-out teeth of the rats that Granny Rags called her friends. She consulted the Heart, just to be sure, and it broke into prose.

_“The world was cruel to boys like him,_  
_A fearful, lonely wight._  
_He hid in alleys from the ones  
_ _Who didn’t treat him right._

_“His only friend a small white rat_  
_Who curled inside his coat,_  
_He wiped the blood and tears and smiled  
_ _Although he di’n’t have mote._

_“One night he hid ‘neath sticks and bone_  
_Until a stranger grand_  
_Said “I’ll grant you pow’r and strength galore,  
_ _If you give me your hand.”_

_"_ _The boy stood tall and fearless_  
_As the rats tore up the town._  
_His tormentors begged for mercy  
_ _As the vermin dragged them down._

_“But in his rage he’d been uncareful,_  
_For power with such might_  
_Can just as quickly monstrous turn  
_ _With a single little bite._

_“As his eyes began to weep_  
_He reached out for the dark._  
_The Outsider had disappeared,  
_ _Just left his treach’rous Mark._

_“And so the boy said thanks unheard_  
_Save for his closest friend._  
_Smiling for his pow’r and courage  
__The boy embraced his end.”_  

Emily eyed the rat suspiciously, and little red beads stared back. “Okay,” she said slowly. “But you’re not getting inside my coat.” 

When she put her hand on the rune, it wailed harmoniously, and she felt the cold pierce through her like a spear. The shrine itself started to buzz with anticipation, and seemed to groan under strain. At the last second, Emily threw her arms up to defend her face from splinters, but when the shrine exploded, the pieces hung in the air, and she was pulled again into the Void.

“Well, you’ve certainly had an eventful few days,” the Outsider mused. He was still acting dull and nonchalant, but there was something of a theatrical swagger in his walk as he paced. She knew he was enjoying this.

“You’ve banished the High Overseer, killed the Pendleton twins, and freed yourself from captivity all by yourself. You’ve got my interest.

“Children have taken my Mark before. Young, creative minds often make inventive uses of the Void and its magic… but there’s a price, and I think you’ve seen that now. The Mark responds most strongly to volatile emotions. To a disciplined man, that is no obstacle. But to a child…”

He disappeared and then reappeared again, at her other side.

“So what’s next for you, young Emily? You could work your way back across the city, down the river, until you reach the home that’s been taken from you. Or you could keep going even further, out of Dunwall and into the great wide world you’ve always dreamed of exploring. You could do neither of those things. I am fascinated to see what you choose.”

He looked like he was going to keep going, so she cut in. “Maybe if you stopped talking, I could tell you.”

He stopped pacing, and despite his efforts to keep his composure at all times, she saw a tiny wrinkle form on his forehead as he frowned. Then he grew a smile, a chilling thing, and said, “I think I’ll just watch.”

When Emily walked back up the path to the house, she found that the white rat had followed her, scampering along at her feet. He squeaked when she held the door open for him, and she imagined that he was giving her his gratitude.

The rat made off down the hallway, but paused in front of a door and looked back at Emily, as if inviting her to follow. As she approached the room, she heard more squeaks and readied herself to run, fearing that her new “friend” had led her into a swarm of hungry rats.

What she saw instead was a pair of birdcages filled with birds, not squeaking but tweeting. One cage had in it a small flutter of sparrows, all jumping around and chirping in the presence of new company, and the other had a pair of magpies – one of them dead. Both cages were filthy and cramped.

Without hesitation, Emily took the handles of the little prisons. It was only once she had them in her hands that she heard a voice singing out-of-tune, and footsteps approaching the front door.

“Dreary dreary dearie, come out with me instead. Dreary dreary dearie, you can’t because you’re dead.”

She hurried up the stairs with all the birds chittering at her, and whispered an apology for not keeping them steady. While the key scraped against the lock as the woman fumbled with the door, she made it up to the landing, and set her eyes on the balcony.

The door was opening downstairs, and she put down both cages so that she could unfasten the latch on the magpie’s prison. It manoeuvred itself wearily out of the open cage, leaving its departed companion behind, while she tried to undo the latch on the other cage. There was an abrupt and deathly shriek from downstairs, and the magpie took off immediately.

“My bones!” Granny Rags quaked. “They took my bones! I need those bones, I need them! Need them for the handsome man, to make him happy, to show him I care…”

While she raved and despaired, Emily finished fumbling with the lock and the sparrows burst free, whistling and whooping loudly, and the cage door banged shut on itself behind them.

“What was that?” Granny Rags demanded, appearing in the room behind her in a puff of smoke and feathers midway through the sentence. “You!” she screamed. “You stole my bones!”

The woman lunged at her with long, pointed fingernails and Emily turned, scooped the white rat off the floor, and took a running jump off the balcony. Her wings beat – one, two, three, four, five – and she touched down on the roof of a tiled overpass. She didn’t slow down; another few steps and then she jumped again, hearing Granny Rags wail behind her:

“Come back, bones! Come back to Granny!”

The rat ran up Emily’s arm to her shoulder and squeaked. She imagined he was saying, “Thank the Void we’re out of there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem is in reference to [Tales from Dunwall (Chapter II: The Hand that Feeds)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoUvh0xNuhs).
> 
> I hope you guys have been enjoying this so far - if you have the time to leave a comment I would really appreciate it. Let me know what you liked or what you think will happen next!


	5. Just Desserts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Making her way through the desolate streets of plague-ridden Dunwall, Emily encounters a slice of the Estate District that still hasn’t stopped partying. She decides to take advantage.

“Empty,” Emily sighed, closing the last cupboard door. She’d been up and down the district, in and out of all the evicted houses, and all she had to show for it was a tin of Pratchett Jellied Eels and half a loaf of very stale bread. Everything else she’d found had been rotten.

“Come on, Atticus Ratticus,” she said, and the rat looked up at her. He’d been sniffing around at the bottom of the very dusty, torn sofa, but evidently found nothing. As he scampered up her outstretched arm, she added, “At least we got a new bone charm out of it.”

There were three hooked onto her trousers, now; the first made her footsteps quieter, the second made her jumps higher, and the third’s power had yet to be revealed.

She’d crossed over the river to Drapers Ward because she’d hoped she could find more food there than in the run-down Distillery District, but it had fallen apart since her last visit. When she had been fitted for a dress on Main Street, it had had a lively marketplace – now all the shops had their shutters down. She had seen the dressmaker from her perch on one of the roofs, hurrying along the edges of the road with his hands held close. He’d been lively, too, once. She’d given him some drawings, and he’d beamed.

So she was making her way across the waterfront, towards the Estate District. She was bound to find better food there, and the Heart was tugging her in that direction, too, towards more runes and charms.

_"This city is built on the bones of the great ones."_

Home was also in that direction, if it was still home. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to go back. Maybe she could retrieve Mrs. Pilsen – but she didn’t have to stay, not when Mother and Corvo were gone. She could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.

She was trying not to think about it too much.

There was another City Watch checkpoint up ahead. There were getting to be more of them the closer she came to the wealthy estates. She’d heard guards talking about the stilt walkers too, but she hadn’t encountered one yet.

On her way past the Wall of Light – a simple jump onto the rooftops was enough – she swiped a ripe Morley apple and an elixir from the Watch station. They could replace it with all that bribe money they were getting from the Alderdices and the Ramseys, she justified.

It was difficult for her to find her way around the Estate District. The sprawling private grounds of each noble family made it hard to navigate the area, with large areas filled with nothing but grass between some buildings. Streets and by-streets and canals wrapped around estates for access to the basements and the serving quarters, making Emily run up on dead ends constantly.

The stilt walkers began patrolling as the sky turned to twilight. For her first encounter, she managed to avoid being spotted by ducking under a flight of steps. She felt the vibrations of the stilts through the ground as they walked, and when she peeked out from under her hiding place, she saw the way their hand was poised on the string of their bow, and how their metal helmet swept from side to side, searching for trespassers.

She’d reached for the Heart in her pocket, not because she needed its wisdom but just for the feel of it in her hand. Over the last few days, she’d tried imagining that it was Corvo’s hand she was holding, not just his voice.

“Why have we already got the tallboys out?” a guardsman asked the nearest other officer. “Bigwigs a bit jumpy tonight?”

“Don’t you pay attention to anything?” the officer scorned. “There’s a party at the Boyle mansion tonight. They paid for extra security on the streets. I guess they think someone might try to sneak in or something. The whole district’s invited to this thing, but Void forbid anyone without a manor try to have a little fun.”

It didn’t take long after that for the invitees to start appearing on the streets. Many of them were fumbling with masks, some at the same time as trying to keep the hems of their dresses or robes out of the dirty street. From her hiding place in a deserted section of the district, Emily watched them. Over the walls of the Boyle manor grounds, fireworks were being launched into the sky. Bright colours from all over the spectrum, popping and crackling and drowning out the moans of the weepers clustered this side of the canal.

Emily glanced at the body in the corner of the apartment she was hiding in. His chest was rising and falling in shuddering motions and gasping sounds, and sleep hardly seemed restful to him.

The weepers were so lost in their own delirium that sneaking up on them was easy, although she’d struggled a bit from there. Even with his stooped stance, he was much taller than her, and Corvo had never had a chance to show her that Tyvian choke hold, so she’d had to guess. She’d actually ended up flipping him onto his back and then stuffing a musty pillow into his face until his limbs relaxed.

Not a perfect first attempt. She’d been lucky that the noise hadn’t attracted more weepers.

She prepared to jump to the next balcony along. She wasn’t even bothering to check the houses on this street for food; most of it would be rotten for sure, and whatever wasn’t belonged to the weepers for as long as they had the self-awareness to eat.

The real target was the homes along Ogelsby Way, still lit up with warm lanterns and stocked with pantries full of food. With every noble in the district attending the Boyle party, breaking in would be a piece of cake.

Before that, though, the Heart was eager to find a shrine that was tucked in the corner of one of the houses on Barcroft Court, this side of the canal. Only one wall separated her from it now, and the Heart beat feverishly, but she held back. There were weepers inside this house, and she couldn’t take them all at once.

Summoning the power of the Mark, she created the clanking sounds of a tallboy on the street in front of the balcony. The image she summoned was hazy, without some template to cast it on, but it didn’t matter. The weepers were too far gone to see that it was an illusion, and they hurried downstairs with yelps and groans, out of sight of their assailant.

The room was covered in graffiti, like all of the homes on this street, but this time it was different. On the wall of one of the bedrooms, the word ‘DREARY’ was written over and over by a shaky finger, and beneath it on the floor, a message was written in the same white paint:

 _YOU WANtED Me TO   DECiDe._  
_YOU   AsKED  ME  TO DO  iT  ._  
_ThERE’s a hole in   thE WORLD._

Beside the words was a handprint and a body.

A very, very old body, surrounded by candles shrouded in dust. It was rotten, but its flesh was flayed in places where the bones had been cut out of it. Atticus Ratticus sniffed the paint on the floor and then retreated to Emily’s feet.

She almost knew what she would find inside the book tucked into a shelf in the corner of the room, but she looked anyway.

 _ 36, Month of Birdies, 1814  
_ _I can't trust him, you can't love what you don't trust. That's the song the birdies sing when the weather turns cold and forces them out of their nice homes they built. Nice homes spoiled. Spoiled and ruined. Useless now. So the birdies hate the weather that betrayed them. They fly away to look for new homes that aren't so cold and dreary, dreary, dreary._

_I am leaving too. My valise is packed. So dreary everywhere I look. I can't bear it anymore._

She turned to stare at the shrine on the opposite side of the apartment, with its candles still flickering purple and strangely clean ornate sheets draped around it. When she put her hand on the buzzing rune, the Outsider launched right into a prepared speech.

“Lady Boyle’s last party. Half the city can see the lights from her manor, and they dream of the delights inside. Aren’t you curious, young Emily? Your mother never took you to an event quite like this.”

“Did you tell Granny Rags to kill her husband?” she demanded.

His face turned to a frown briefly, upset that she wasn’t playing along with his game. His composure snapped back into place when he replied, “I don’t tell my chosen to do anything. Your choices are all your own. I am no more responsible for Bertrand Moray’s death than you are.

“Before your grandfather took the throne, an Emperor begged for her hand, and rich young men fought each other for her favour. I watched her consider them all, measure their worth, and find them wanting. Then she made a different choice.

“The guests partying across the canal made their choices too. They chose to stand by and let the Lord Regent turn this city to ruin. Let innocent people suffer of a deadly disease in favour of dancing the night away in their safe, clean, warm houses. Will you stand by, and let their avarice and gluttony continue?”

She opened her mouth to respond, but she felt something like the air rushing out of the room, and suddenly she was back on Barcroft Court. She fit her scarf around her nose and mouth again – she’d lifted it from an abandoned shop in Drapers Ward, to keep out the plague and the stink of the slaughterhouses along the waterfront. It was pretty royal blue silk with a pattern of gold printed sparrows.

Her real birthday this year had been passed over unacknowledged in the Golden Cat, so she was considering this her birthday present. The Heart murmured as she crossed the street that lead onto Ogelsby Way.

_"Death hides behind a mask like all the rest. He comes like a thief in the night dressed in red, and no one suspects.”_

That meant Corvo liked her scarf, she decided.

Emily had no intention of attending the party at the Boyle manor, despite the Outsider’s goading. She was being practical and grown-up; she couldn’t blend in with the crowd easily enough to get in and out without anyone noticing, and she could get what she needed elsewhere.

That, and she remembered the flame she’d lit in Custis’ eyes the last time she’d been cornered. How that flame had vanished, leaving his eyes vacant.

She wasn’t in a hurry to light another fire.

Number 18 Ogelsby Way had its top floor window open, and Emily climbed inside. The lights were mostly out on the upper floors, but there was a warm glow increasing the closer she got to the kitchens and the pantry. She started to hear people talking.

“What are you doing? The master said we’re still on the clock while he’s out,” one of the servants said.

“Relax. Every time there’s a party in this neighbourhood, the lords and ladies come home too smashed to notice a thing. If we tell them they asked for a bottle of cider when they got in and that’s why it’s missing, they’ll believe us,” a maid replied. “Every maid and servant on the street is doing the same thing, trust me.”

Emily heard the sound of drinks being poured. A third voice joined the fray, and then a fourth, all encouraging the nervous man to join in on the fun.

The group was sitting in one of the smaller lounges of the house, a place they would never be allowed to relax normally. She snuck past into the pantry, where she took some bread – the most fresh she’d had in months – a jar of chutney, a block of cheese, and a bunch of grapes. With her haul in her arms, she thought she heard a merry set of footsteps approaching the kitchen, and disappeared up the stairs to consume her miniature feast in the dark.

In the next house she visited, the smell of freshly baked sausage rolls filled her nose, and hiding in the rafters of the kitchen she spied a tray of them cooling. She tried to pick one up, but it was still piping, and the pastry burned her fingers. She dropped it, and it made the tray clatter; a tiny sound, but it sounded colossal.

“Damn rats in the kitchen again,” one of the servants muttered, hurrying down the hallway, and Emily pulled the cuff of her sleeve over her hand, grabbed the pastry, and vanished as quickly as she could. She let the wind on the roof of the manor blow her prize cooler, and then savoured every warm bite with relish. Buttery, crispy pastry and fatty, herby sausage.

The stilt walkers patrolled on the street below. She was a tall man’s height above them up here, but she still felt nervous, like they could look up at any moment and spot her. The tallest perch in the district was the Clocktower, a few streets over. Emily decided to make her way over there.

Still full from her very generously-sized snacks gathered across the district, she decided not to venture below the upper floors of the next few houses, and instead used one particularly underused bathroom to wash herself. She poured bath salts into the hot water and lowered herself into the tub with a contented sigh. As she scrubbed away the dirt and washed her hair with scented foam, it occurred to her that there would likely not be a party as grand as the Boyles’ every night. She would not be able to take advantage of their homes, vacant except for the serving staff who were rapidly getting just as drunk as their employers down the road.

Even if there was, she didn’t want to slum in this neighbourhood forever, especially with the tallboys roaming. She would need supplies later, ones she didn’t have the room to carry on her now.

Most of wealthy people’s riches were kept in banks or private vaults, she knew, but the bars of heavy gold and silver were no use to her anyway. What she needed was coin pouches and loose change scattered around the house, which had been easier to find in Drapers Ward, broke as it was, than here.

There was a City Watch station not far from the Parliament building. The officers around here could afford to lose some cash, she thought, so she ducked into the temporary checkpoint office and shovelled a pouch and some loose change into her pocket.

“What are you doing?” asked an officer, distantly.

Emily ducked under the desk at the sound of approaching footsteps and held her breath.

“I thought I heard something.” His feet were visible in the entrance to the checkpoint.

“Probably rats. Into everything.”

“I dunno…”

All he had to do was duck his head and he’d see her. She had to conjure an illusion. She had to do something – but she had so little space, and panic was making blood rush through her ears, making it hard to think.

Atticus Ratticus jumped from her shoulder onto the wooden floor and scampered past the guard into the street while he yelled.

“Little bastard!” he said, trying to stomp him, but he was too quick, and the guard gave up. He sighed. “How much longer are we gonna be out in the cold?”

With his back to the entrance of the checkpoint, Emily could see his pouch clipped onto his belt. There was an impulsive itch in her fingers, even with the awareness that she had just barely gotten out of danger, and she lifted it from him in a smooth motion. As he moved away, she propelled herself into the alley that Atticus had disappeared into, and hid behind a dumpster.

The rat emerged from under the bin and she smiled at him, scratching behind his ears. “Thank you, Atticus,” she whispered. “You’re the best friend a renegade thief could ask for.”

She had become something of a swashbuckler in the last week or so, she thought. The kind of person who might be the hero of an adventure – like Corvo. He would never admit that he was a daring rogue, but she could tell. All the climbing and swordfighting, and love for her mother; he was made for adventure. If only he had agreed to take her on a trip, they could tame the high seas and battle sea monsters just like in her favourite stories.

_“Young people go to sea without knowing they should fear the leviathans of the deep.”_

Maybe she and Corvo – she and the Heart, and Atticus Ratticus their faithful companion – could take that adventure now. Get out of Dunwall and discover the Great Unknown.

The alley was a dead end, but there was a basement window that was cracked open just slightly, and she pried it wide with her fingers. One of the kitchen staff was humming to himself and removing a tray from the cool storage room, and he placed it on the countertop before going to fetch something else from another part of the kitchen, closing a cutlery drawer on his way.

On the tray were rows of miniature trifles, topped with excessive cream and chocolate shavings. As carefully as she dared, Emily lowered herself onto the counter, plucked a trifle from the tray and a spoon from the drawer, and dashed up the servant stairs towards the roof.

This house was next door to the clocktower. Looking at her creamy treat, she braced herself and jumped, using her wingbeats to cross the road above a tallboy’s head and land on the roof of the Parliament building. From there, she could easily use her wings to climb the framework of the tower, and soon she was sitting on the ledge beneath the illuminated clock face.

The sugar on her tongue was sweeter than anything she’d ever tasted before, and she kicked her dangling legs and smiled while she watched the fireworks, still going strong, at the Boyle manor.

She hadn’t long finished her dessert when she saw people starting to rush out onto the streets. At first she thought that someone must have startled the weepers out of their hiding places, but when she squinted, her vision zoomed like a spyglass. She saw that the frantic people were party guests, still dressed in their elaborate attire, and their screams came with the new scope.

Dancing around the screaming people’s feet were hordes and hordes or rats, pouring out of the mansion and creating a sea of little squirming bodies. Guests near the doors were starting to fall and drown in it. Watchmen were swinging their swords at the pests, but if they were doing anything at all, it was hardly noticeable.

One aristocrat actually scrambled onto the shoulders of a guard, blubbering hysterically, “They just appeared from nothing! Crawled out of thin air like mites from woodwork!”

“I’m a Baron!” someone screeched, as if his status (virtually on par with everybody else running for their lives) should grant him special protection. “I’m a Baron!”

The tallboys were trying to contain the perimeter, but no one was issuing orders or seemed sure about what they should do, so they just started firing into the street at the rats. Some well-aimed shots hit rats and cast aflame, but their dampness and how far apart they were spreading meant that it was nearly an arrow to a rat.

To make the situation even more chaotic, weepers started to wander from their hovels to investigate the commotion and were quickly swept up in the panic.

“Don’t let the plague get out!” barked somebody who might’ve been City Watch or might've been a particularly gruff aristocrat, and the stilt walkers loosed arrows at all the plague they could see. Weepers screeched as they burned, and the rats scurried away from the flames as fast as they could, and slowly, slowly, the commotion quietened.

That was, until a scandalised shriek ripped through the air – even without her spyglass power, Emily would have heard it from the clocktower.

“You shot Lady Boyle!”

No more words could be made out due to the hundred overlapping voices that all fought to be heard in the next instant. The Watch tried to placate the hysterical guests, who were all demanding to know who loosed the arrow as well as an impossible explanation for where two thousand rats had appeared from, and who was going to pay for the emotional and physical damages to this, that, and the next thing.

“Did you have anything to do with this?” Emily asked Atticus Ratticus, who squeaked innocently in response from inside her hood.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here while they’re all distracted.”


	6. Against the Tide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are secrets hidden in every corner of Dunwall, and some are more sinister than others. Emily has a decision to make. Dunwall’s fate is in her hands, as is her own.

Emily was running faster than she’d ever run. Her legs were burning and her lungs were heaving but she kept pushing, each _squelch_ of the carpet under her feet driving her forward.

The squelches turned to splashes, and dirty water flecked her tights as she kicked it up. She rounded the corner and pounced on the stairs like a life raft while the water lapped at the sides of her shoes, and then kept scrambling upwards. She flung the door open to Corvo’s chambers and called his name, aware of every millimetre that the water was gaining on the stairs.

“Corvo where are you!” she called.

She looked under the tables and the bed and behind the screens and inside the cabinets. She searched and searched until the water was at her knees. She was always supposed to go to Corvo when there was trouble. Corvo always kept her safe. But he wasn’t here, and the water was rising and rising, and she was finding it hard not to cry.

“Corvooooo!” she wailed, standing in the middle of the room. The water was approaching her waist and chilling her to the bone. She felt something in the water brush against her leg and squealed, wading as quickly as she could to the bed.

Standing on top of it only got her shins above the water, and it was still rising fast. She was going to get eaten alive by hagfish, and then she was going to drown, and she was never going to find Corvo…

She didn’t even have Mrs. Pilsen to comfort her.

The change in the water was sudden and difficult to comprehend. At first it felt like thousands of sponges had appeared and soaked up all the water. And then the sponges started to _move_ , and then—

And then she realised the sponges were rats.

She was waist-deep in squeaking, squirming rats, and the more she wriggled, the more they bit. She sobbed at them to stop, that it hurt, that she wanted Corvo. The rats were still climbing, somehow, rising like the water, and as they approached her neck, she took a deep breath

and gasped awake.

Daylight was edging into the abandoned apartment where she’d made her bed, and Atticus Ratticus was peering up at her from the floor. As she got up, she readjusted the sash of bone charms that was strapped around her shoulder, and sighed. “Maybe we should try and find a bone charm that stops bad dreams,” she suggested.

Atticus squeaked in agreement.

From the window, she could see Kaldwin’s Bridge, as colossal in the morning as it had been in the dead of night. It had been easy enough to cross the gap with her wings and the cover of darkness, but climbing up to the uppermost beams in order to make the leap had been scarier than she’d like to admit.

On her way over, she’d picked up a conversation between two of the guards about the rats bombarding the Walls of Light and getting vaporised. One of them had chipped in that he’d heard about a woman who started raving in Holger Square that she was immune to the plague because a horde of rats had passed her by.

“Already sick with the plague is more likely.”

“That’s the strange thing, the Overseers that subdued her said she seemed fine. And you know the rats don’t ever pass up a meal that’s just milling around in the streets.”

“So what did they do?”

“Shipped her off to the Academy, of course. Who knows what they’re doing to her now.”

“Sokolov’ll have her cut up into little pieces. Poor bastard.”

“Still, if it cures the plague.”

“Right. ‘Sometimes the boldest measures are the safest.’ Etcetera.”

Emily shivered at the Lord Regent’s catchphrase. The words had been pasted all over the city, as well as into the minds of the Watchmen. They were being used to justify a lot of things that the Empress wouldn’t have stood for.

She had passed by the Royal Physician’s house on the way out of North End. She hadn’t seen him since the day her mother was killed – painting Campbell’s portrait with the Wrenhaven as his backdrop. Sokolov had never seemed to like Campbell, or the Spymaster, or anybody very much. But he’d always told good stories. And her mother had trusted him.

It seemed like her mother had trusted a lot of people she shouldn’t.

Dunwall Tower felt too close and too far away at the same time. She could see it; it was just across the river, behind the bridge. But right now, that river seemed like an impossible expanse. Getting to it over the buildings wouldn’t work either – there were Walls of Light on every street surrounding the Tower, and since the Boyle party incident, there were Watchmen patrolling on the roofs.

Her current plan was to travel along the waterfront until she found a boat she could use, but the terrain in this part of the city was more difficult. Many of the buildings were falling down and made for unstable perches, and there were a lot of sheer ramshackle walls constructed to keep out the plague or possibly the water from the flooded financial district.

It was with one of these walls as her obstacle that she found an unlocked sewer grate. She made a face that her governesses would have called unbecoming, and exchanged a glance with Atticus Ratticus.

They didn’t have a choice.

The smell of the sewers was a sensation that she had never before experienced, and hoped never to again. Even with her scarf over her face, the scent ran up her nose like a bolt of vile horse radish. She hadn’t thought there could be anything much worse than the apartments in the Distillery District, full of plague and poo and alcohol, but this was all of that and more.

She was so occupied with moving as quickly as she could through the sewer system that she didn’t hear the moans of the weepers until it was too late. She had two seconds and nowhere to hide – even if she cast an illusion, they would walk right into her when they rounded the corner, and she couldn’t back up without making some kind of noise, not in this putrid echo chamber.

She jumped into the water.

On the bright side, she got away from the weepers. Hearing the splashes, they either concluded that she was a hagfish or that she wasn’t worth bothering with. On the bright side, she found out that her latest bone charm helped her see clearly underwater.

Those were the only two positive things that could be said about the experience.

When she pulled herself out of the muck, she coughed and spat, gagging at the “water” inside her nose. Her first thought went to her drawings, drenched and filthy in her coat pocket. She fished them out and tossed the sopping mess onto the stone, to be trampled by rats and weepers along with all the other scraps of paper that had been discarded in the sewer.

She scowled as she watched Atticus shake himself, splattering more dirt everywhere. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered.

Why was she even trying to get back to Dunwall Tower? It wasn’t as if stupid Mrs. Pilsen missed her, she was just a doll, a silly little kid’s toy. Mother was gone, and Corvo was gone, and the Lord Regent was a rotten old man, and none of it mattered. She should have stayed at the Golden Cat, where it was warm and clean and dry, and Violetta saved little trifles for her and Constance made her giggle, sometimes, on a good day.

The Heart quivered in her pocket. _"Their fate rests on your effort. On the strength of your heart."_

“Shut up,” she sobbed. She wanted to wipe her tears, but her hands were covered in shit. She wanted _Corvo_ to wipe her tears, but he was only a voice trapped in clockwork. “I don’t care. I want to go home.”

She didn’t explain herself. If Corvo were really here, he would understand that she didn’t mean Dunwall Tower. Corvo always understood.

_“I am sorry.”_

Emily’s tears stopped. She couldn’t be sure what the Heart meant by that; it could be, like so many of the thoughts it seemed to whisper, that it was part of a distant and unreachable memory. Some fragment of the past uttered in a confused daze. But she let herself pretend, just for long enough to pick herself up, that Corvo was really in there, and he could really hear her, and he was really sorry.

Further down the tunnel, there was a locked gate that opened into the river. She couldn’t get through, but she soon discovered hatches like the one she had first entered through, and, standing on her tip-toes, she slid one open.

To her surprise, the building she emerged in was lit by lanterns, and she heard voices – coherent ones – in one of the adjacent rooms.

“Everything’s falling apart, Pendleton,” one of the men said, and Emily froze, remembering the golden flash of malice in Morgan’s eyes and the sneer that Custis had regarded her with. If they caught her, she would be in so much trouble, she thought.

And then she remembered that both of the Pendleton twins were dead.

She squeezed the Heart and let herself imagine that its pulsing was him squeezing back. Steadying her breath and peeking around the corner as carefully as she could, she saw a large room with table booths lining the outside and a bar on the inside. At one of the tables, bathed in flickering golden light, two men were sitting and drinking. One of them was wearing a navy uniform, and the other bore a strong resemblance to his brothers – he must be Treavor.

Although the navy man was addressing Treavor, he didn’t seem to care that he was paying more attention to his drink. “All that preparation, and for what? Corvo is dead, and Campbell is in the wind. Without him, we’ll never find Emily.”

Treavor raised his glass, and whiskey came dangerously close to sloshing out of it. “Well, I say good riddance. To my rotten brothers too. And whatserface Boyle, that hag. Fuck the lot of ‘em.” He hiccupped.

The other man didn’t seem to be listening. Emily wondered what the point of this conversation was, if neither party was actually willing to converse with one another. “If only we still had Martin, he might be able to connect us to this new player that’s on the scene. Someone disappeared Campbell and Lady Boyle. Even made it look like your brothers killed each other.”

He snorted. “Pfft. My brothers _did_ kill each other, you old fool. An’ the Boyles had ’n unfortunate vermin infestation, thas’ all.”

“I know military strategy when I see it,” he snapped. “Somebody’s taking out the key players in Dunwall, and they’re doing it very carefully.”

Treavor rolled his eyes and rose his tumbler to his lips with a small snicker. “Maybe we should jus’ leave the bastard to it, Adm’ral? At this rate, the moncharchy’ll be restored by morning. Have a drink. Relaaax.”

The Admiral did, in fact, have a drink already, but he was running his finger around the rim instead of drinking it. “You know we can’t let that happen without getting on the right people’s radar, Treavor. As it stands, we’re just treasonous fools.”

_"He has the bloodlust. He tried to seize control of the military after the Empress...”_ The Heart trailed off. It always seemed to have trouble remembering about that day, even though it could see through time and space in so many ways and places. _“After she…? The Empress was murdered.”_

Emily tried to ignore the lump in her throat, redirecting the bitterness she was feeling at the Admiral. He was like the Spymaster and Campbell and Sokolov and all the rest; trying to profit from the stilling of her mother’s heart.

Treavor waved his empty glass in the air. “Lydiaaaaaa,” he called. “Barmaid! Where is that wench?”

He took a sip of his drink. “She’s cleaning out Callista’s room in the tower.”

“What d’you let her leave for?” he slurred, rising out of his seat and stumbling his way over to the bar in order to fetch more alcohol.

“It would hardly be honourable of me to keep her from her uncle when she no longer has a guarantee of work here.”

Treavor snorted again, and mumbled, “Honourable,” before he unstopped a bottle of whiskey and, instead of pouring some into his tumbler, dropped the glass and tipped the decanter to his mouth.

_"Jealous little Treavor. Not in his brothers’ shadow any more."_

Emily backed away into the corridor, but as she turned, she got a face full of someone’s stomach, and there was a shared gasp.

The girl was tall and thin, with red hair tucked loosely under a hat and the ragged clothes of a civilian.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked. Her voice was younger than her face – looking closer, Emily realised that she looked barely older than seventeen, beneath the gaunt features.

“Look at you, you’re filthy…” she tutted. “Lydia will throw a fit, you tracking all this mud through the house. Come on, upstairs. I’ve got to get you cleaned up.”

Bewildered, Emily followed her instructions, up the stairs and through to the bathroom. The girl started to fill it up from the tap, and steam rose into the air. She tipped in some bath salts from the shelf; cheap ones, but after the sewers, Emily would have settled for anything.

She was nervous that someone else would appear – someone who found it strange that she was in the pub, this secret meeting place of Admirals and Lords. But the girl seemed to be the only person around, and she didn’t question her at all. She just commented that her clothes weren’t so waterlogged and disgusting to be unsalvageable, and laid out towels for her when she was ready to get out.

In her confusion, she had forgotten about Atticus, curled inside the hood of her coat, and she heard the girl squeal before the rat came darting back into the bathroom and hid behind a box that was on the shelf.

When Emily got out of the bath and dried herself, she found that her clothes had been hung to dry by one of the stove heaters. Her coat was still damp on the ends, but the only thing that was ruined was her stockings, and fresh ones (too big) had been left in their stead. She wondered if the red-haired girl was magic.

Just as she was pulling her bone charm sash back over her head, she heard a new voice in the hallway.

“Did I see you carrying laundry earlier? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Oh – yes. Sorry, Lydia. It’s just, the girl’s clothes were dirty, and we don’t have anything else that would fit her, so I thought—”

“What girl? What are you talking about, Cecelia?”

“Oh, I-I thought she must be a guest…”

“A guest! How simple-minded are you! The Hound Pits Pub has been closed for eight months, child. Our only ‘guests’ are Admiral Havelock and his friends. And they’re starting to become unwelcome. If they don’t pay off that tab…”

“She just really seemed like she needed a bath, ma’am.”

Cecelia may not have been wise to bring Lydia back to the topic at hand. “This isn’t a charity, Cecelia!” she snapped. “We don’t take in vagrant girls. The little brat probably doused the whole place in plague. Where is she?”

Emily gathered her things and let Atticus scamper up her arm as she rushed towards the nearest door, but after Cecelia’s indication of, “That way,” their footsteps seemed to move in the opposite direction.

“What am I ever going to do with you…” Lydia lamented. Her words trailed away as she walked off down the corridor, Cecelia’s footsteps in tow.

Emily left the pub feeling a mixture of gratitude and guilt that didn’t sit well in her chest. The Heart seemed to agree, fluttering uncertainly in her hand, although that may have been the outbuilding that she found herself next to; there was a purple lamp glowing softly from the inside, and a strange energy about the place. She used her wings to touch down quietly on the balcony and crouched to listen.

An audiograph player was whirring, and a man was speaking into it, sounding suspiciously like a philosopher (all tortured and wobbly). He seemed to be in the middle of some kind of appeal.

“If there’s something I’m missing, then I don’t have the vision to see it. And if I don’t have the vision to see it, perhaps it isn’t to be seen by mortal eyes?”

Emily rolled her mortal eyes at that. Geniuses like Sokolov and Roseburrow were always like this. They spent so much of their time bragging about how clever they were and it made them really, really boring at parties.

Most grown-up parties were boring anyway. But especially when geniuses came to them.

“I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder if all my work was for naught. Did I do something wrong? I spent all those weeks working on that ghastly mask, and then the very day after I finished it, a dream like all the others told me to cast it into the river. And I did. Was this a test? To see if I would destroy my own creation if you only asked?”

She risked peeking over the windowsill. The man was leaning over his table, facing her hiding place, but he wasn’t looking. His glasses were perched on top of his head and he kept rubbing his eyes. She didn’t see what she was looking for; a black Mark on his hand.

“For years, you’ve gifted me with your knowledge of how to create the most wonderful inventions. I’ll admit, it felt at times like a curse, you intruding on my very thoughts – but I’m lost without you. I’m… I’m starting to think maybe none of it was ever real, that I’m just… crazy. I suppose what I really need now is a… sign.”

_“If only he and Sokolov could end their petty differences. They could bring the plague to a grinding halt.”_

Sometimes the Heart’s comments felt directionless. Other times, very, very pointed.

She brought the Mark on her hand up to her mouth and blew. False wind whistled in a Void-like melody, and the inventor stood up straight suddenly with a delighted gasp.

“I knew it! I knew I wasn’t crazy! Oh—please-!” he grabbed a fistful of papers from his bench and shook them. “Tell me what I must do. Something I have to make – anything!”

Licking her lips in concentration, she created a whisper to be carried on the breeze in that echoing voice of the Outsider:

_“Sokolov.”_

There was a moment of stunned silence before he spat, “ _Sokolov_? There’s nothing that old choffer has that I don’t. I will never work with that man on another project. Not after what happened at the Academy.”

Emily had to stop herself from vocalising her annoyance. Reaching for the power of the Mark again, she tried a new approach; she reached behind the man’s eyes, and projected an illusion:

The city overrun with rats. His precious workshop cordoned off for plague, never to be touched again as Dunwall is left to rot. Instead of a headstone, his name appears on a list of the dead that is torn and stained on an ancient billboard.

That seemed to get his attention. Stammering, he uttered several minced curses. “Void’s eyes. Outsider’s teeth. That was—Okay. Okay, I see now. This is bigger than me and Sokolov. It’s bigger than all of us. I have… I have to get to work.”

As he clattered down the stairs of his workshop, Emily sighed and released her magic. The Void wind vanished, and at the same time, the purple flame in the workshop’s lantern extinguished itself.

From this balcony, she realised she could see Dunwall Tower clearly – even while most of the city was lost in the dark, it was lit up with thousands of candles. The Spymaster was up there – in her Tower. In her home.

That just wasn’t going to do.

As her resolve to get across the river returned, her eyes landed on a boat tethered to the shore of this little bay, where a tortured inventor and a disgraced Admiral and a drunken Lord had made their hideaway. Emily wondered if she believed in fate.


	7. Ratted Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emily must return to Dunwall Tower in order to reclaim her old home and find her beloved doll. The walls are full of memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is longer than the rest - are you sitting comfortably? Are you hydrated? Did you eat? Is there anything you need to do first? Do that now. This will still be here for you when you get back.

The boat was moored with a complicated seaman’s knot that Emily found fascinating. Trying to understand the best way to undo it made for several minutes of engrossed picking and leaning and squinting in the dark.

It was because of this that she didn’t notice the figure coming down the steps to the patch of soggy land where it was tied until he said, “Hello? Who’s that?”

“Uh,” Emily said involuntarily, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Conjuring an illusion, she cleared her throat and said in the Admiral’s voice, “Nothing. What are you doing?”

The man fumbled and muttered with something in his hand, and a flame appeared suddenly, illuminating his lantern and casting light around the bay. She couldn’t bring up an illusion in time.

“Ah, hallo there,” he said again. His voice was old, as was his face, with grey hair framing it in a sort of unkempt ring. “That was a clever trick you did with your voice. What might you be doing in this part of town? It’s closed off for the flooding, you know.”

Emily studied him with suspicion. She wasn’t sure what it meant for someone to have an honest face (she certainly hadn’t seen many on her travels) but the man seemed to radiate trust in a way that made you want to trust him in return. “I need this boat,” she answered, in her normal voice.

The man looked between her and the skiff that was tied up at her back. He adopted a crooked frown and hummed as he walked closer – did he have a slight limp, or was that the light wobbling? – and said, “Well, that’s a problem, I’m afraid. That boat’s more o’ less all I have, see. If you take it I won’t have nothin’ at all.”

She looked at the knot and wondered if she could untie it and get the boat moving quickly enough for him to be unable to catch her. She didn’t want to leave such a kind man with nothing, but she could get him a whole battalion of boats once she was back in Dunwall Tower, probably. And she really, really needed it.

“Tell you what,” said the man, surprising her out of planning her scheme, “I been thinking of quitting this place for a couple days now. Maybe I can pilot you out somewhere, if it’s on my way. Where you off to?”

Emily looked across the water at Dunwall Tower looming in the darkness, and pointed. When she turned back to him, he scratched his chin, puckering his lips out in thought. A lump rose in her throat as he looked back and forth between her and her destination. What if he figured out who she was? What if he fetched the Admiral in the pub, or a member of the Watch? She should make a run for it while she still could.

He shrugged, “Well alright then. Gimme a moment to collect my belongings, scarce as they are.”

As she watched him creak back up the steps to a lean-to made out of a boat, she tilted her head to the side and asked the Heart what it saw.

_“He was hired to ferry Death along the river. But he has a good heart.”_

He returned much quicker than she expected. Apparently, all he wanted to take with him from his little den was a book and a tin of jellied eels. He tucked his scarf into his buttoned-up jacket, and said, “Mighty rude of me not to introduce myself. My name’s Samuel. What’s yours?”

She hesitated for a moment, and then answered, “Maggie.”

“A pleasure,” he nodded warmly, and started to stow his humble belongings in the boat.

“I’ll only come if you promise not to tell your friends in the bar. I don’t like the look of them,” she said. Even thinking about the third Pendleton sent a shiver up her spine, and the Admiral gave her an uneasy feeling.

He looked up in surprise, and then chuckled. “Miss, I don’t believe those sorts are any kinda friends to a man like me. I promise, I won’t speak a word o’ this to them.” He extended a hand to her, and after deciding to believe him, she took it.

As she stepped aboard, she noticed a scruffy welcome matt on the deck. The original lettering had faded, but someone had painted over it in yellow and underlined it. Emily snickered. “Who are you welcoming?”

“Only the finest lords and ladies of the land,” Samuel replied, in what she thought was supposed to be a posh voice, although the gruff rumble of his own accent seemed to drown it out.

Atticus Ratticus snuffled in her ear from where he was hidden inside her hood, reminding her that they were also welcoming the finest rats of the land.

He expertly unmoored the boat and started the engine. The skiff wasn’t as fast as she’d supposed – definitely not an ideal getaway vehicle – but it was fast enough.

Emily watched her reflection skim along the water. Maybe it was the new clothes, or the moonlight, but she didn’t look like the same girl who had once stuck her hand in the river on a boat ride despite her mother’s warnings and been promptly bitten by a hagfish.

She knew what kinds of things lurked in unseen places now.

“So, Miss Maggie,” Samuel said, just as her reflection was disturbed by an eel swishing its tail to get out of the boat’s path. “You ever visited the Tower before? Cause it might be different from the last time you was there.”

For the first time, Emily noticed something unfamiliar in the Tower’s silhouette. It had blended into the city behind it before, but there was some kind of tower sticking up from the roof that had never been there as long as she’d lived. “I don’t remember that,” she said, nodding at it.

“That’ll be the Lord Regent’s safe room. He had it built just shortly after the Empress, bless’er heart, was killed. This city ain’t been right in a while, but it ain’t got no better since she’s been gone, that’s for sure.”

She took out the Heart from her pocket and held it in her cupped hands. Suddenly her nerves were shooting all over the place, and she needed its steady beats. She was scared of the obstacles between her and her home. She was scared of the Lord Regent. She was scared of what was going to happen in the morning.

The Heart just beat on. _Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum._

“Now pardon me if this is rude, but you seem awful young to be boating across the river on your own. Ain’t you got anybody lookin’ out for you?” Samuel asked.

Her fingertips were freezing, not covered by the strips of silk that she had wrapped around her hands to hide the Mark and complete her outfit, but she kept a tight hold of the Heart. “My mother and father are dead.”

She felt a little rush at calling Corvo her father – she wasn’t supposed to, and she’d promised she wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Mrs. Pilsen. But Corvo’s name meant something else now, and without anybody knowing that she was Lady Emily, there was no danger in talking about her father.

As long as she also didn’t call him Corvo. Her excitement was quickly crushed by that reminder.

“Hm,” Samuel said, with a nod. “Yeah. Mine too.”

They were quite a way from both banks of the river now, and the Tower was starting to become daunting. She wasn’t sure she’d ever noticed before how _big_ it was. As she looked up at it, the Heart pumped more rapidly. She felt around for the tug that meant a rune was resting on the riverbed below, but there was none.

_“There is a memory of this place,”_ the Heart said abruptly.

Emily leaned in close to it, eyes wide. “You remember the Tower?”

_“I remember… the river,”_ it strained, as if it was physically difficult to keep hold of the memory. _“A boat, waiting for the sunrise.”_

She didn’t breathe in the next moment. She could feel the last word, taut in the air like a harp string being pulled back in preparation of a note. She had never heard heartbreak more pronounced than it was in the next three beats:

_“Jessamine.”_

She waited for him to say more, but it fell silent. The pulsing slowed again, and it seemed to go back into its dream-like state, the one where it spun poetry from the Void.

Emily scrunched her face up. Why didn’t it remember _her_? This shell of a thing wasn’t Corvo, it wasn’t her father, it was just his words all caught up in clockwork. The real Corvo was sharp, and clever, and he always _always_ saw her even when she didn’t want to be found.

“Hey now,” said a voice, and she flinched away from the hand that rested on her shoulder. Samuel lifted his palm apologetically. “We’re almost there, Miss Maggie. I can still turn around and drop you someplace else.”

“No,” she said quickly, wiping the snot from her nose. “No. I have to get to the Tower.”

“Your wish is my command.” He smiled, just as crookedly as how he frowned. He started to pull up the skiff alongside an outcrop of rocks outside the water lock.

She stuffed the Heart inside her jacket and hopped out of the boat. “Thank you, Samuel,” she said.

“I can wait for you, if y’like,” he offered.

She was baffled by his kindness. The Watch and the Madame and the Bottle Street gang and the Hatters and Granny Rags all showed her that the kind people in the world were dying out. They were being killed or stifled or made unkind, because that’s what happened when a city got poisoned like Dunwall.

But there were still people like Samuel. There were still people like Constance and Violetta. There were still people who tried to be kind.

“No thank you,” she said. “I won’t be coming back.”

She prepared to jump and use her wings to get up the inside of the water lock, but he had one last thing to say.

“You be careful, Your Highness. And don’t worry; your secret’s safe with old Samuel.”

She gaped at him as the turned the boat and set off back down the river, towards the sea. Atticus squeaked at her. “Did he just say what I think he just said?” she imagined he was asking.

“Yes, he did,” she answered. She shook her head to clear it and focused again on her target: the overflow tunnel near the top of the lock. She had enough wingbeats to reach it without even getting her feet wet, and after a bit of crawling she was on the scaffolding around the edge of this section of Dunwall Tower.

She poked her head over the battlements to properly survey the grounds. There were stilt walkers, guards, and a watchtower, as predicted. She had an advantage that they didn’t: she had been playing hide and seek here for her whole life, and the only person better than her at hide and seek was Corvo.

When she reached the end of the scaffolding, she could hear two people having a conversation. They confirmed what she already knew—

“Don’t you love the view from here?”

“This place makes me sad.”

“Why is that?”

“This is where the Empress was killed by that wretched murderer.”

She was right next to the gazebo. She waited until they finished talking and she heard two sets of footsteps leaving, and then climbed over the battlements.

The flagstones were as pristine as they had ever been. It was dark, but Emily looked close – there wasn’t even an outline where the dried blood had failed to be lifted. Dedicated scrubbing by the maids had rendered it immaculate, as if it had never been stained. As if she had never died.

There was a shiny, golden plaque hammered into a piece of stonework standing at the base of one of the pillars. It read:

IN MEMORY OF

HER MAJESTY  
JESSAMINE  
KALDWIN 

MOTHER TO EMILY  
EMPRESS TO US ALL

She reached into her pocket to wrap her hand around the Heart. It was beating, strong, but not with the fervour it had before. When it spoke, its words were measured and chilling.

_"We have both been here before."_

Emily shivered. She left the gazebo and started to poke around in some of the bushes in the surrounding area. “Mrs. Pilsen?” she whispered. “ _Mrs. Pilsen_.”

She was sure she had left her somewhere around here. She’d asked her to keep a beady eye on the Spymaster, because Mother had sent her away while she talked to him. Then she’d wandered down to the water lock and seen that Corvo was back early…

She’d forgotten about Mrs. Pilsen in the excitement. She must have seen everything that happened.

She didn’t seem to be here, though, so one of the maids must have recovered her and taken her inside. Maybe given her a gentle bath and tucked her into bed.

The structures hastily put up for the tripled security didn’t look particularly stable, but Emily took her chances on the roofs of them, creeping across the courtyard slowly but surely. The eastern side of the grounds was full of abandoned efforts to expand the already sprawling patrol areas, although clearly no one was in any hurry to finish. There mustn’t be access to the Tower from this angle – for ordinary people, that was.

The biggest change to the grounds was the statue that had been erected in front of the stairs that lead to the front doors. It caught the light of the stark spotlights and projected a hostile golden tint to its surroundings. The Regent had had the statues of himself put up all around the Tower District, but this was the biggest one, standing tall with his eyes looking way above the tiny people that walked below.

The statue was ugly. She was going to take it down at earliest convenience.

An illusion of a distracting noise got the only guard in her path out of the way, and from there it was a matter of using the ledge above the massive main entrance to get into a hatch that opened into the Tower.

She was met by a rush of warm air, and she closed the hatch behind her as she entered the vents. She only had to manoeuvre around a couple of corners before the vent opened into the foyer.

Over the last few months, she had come to think that she had exaggerated the nasal sneer of the Spymaster in her memory. His voice surely wasn’t _that_ grating. The Burrows of her memory was a child’s caricature.

His presence in the foyer reminded her of his bitter face and the way his eyebrows looked like they hadn’t moved in years from a downward slant. When she was little she had suggested that he was afraid if he made an expression, they would fall off, leaving him without any hair at all. Her mother had tried to hide a laugh behind a cough and told her not to be so rude.

He had his hands tucked behind his back, his collar turned out perfectly in an arrangement she was sure was held together by wires. As he asked General Tobias for his report, she realised she hadn’t exaggerated his voice at _all_.

“Everything is secure on the grounds, Lord Regent.”

“It won’t hurt to check again, General. Nevertheless I will retire to my bedroom unless the alarm is sounded.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I advise you to stay in your saferoom tonight.”

“And I advise you to mind your own business,” he snapped. “I need the comfort of my own bed. I trust you and your men can handle that?”

“…Yes, sir.”

After Burrows had disappeared up the stairs, one of the Watchmen dropped her attention stance and stretched. “What’s got his garters in a knot?” she asked.

“You didn’t hear? Lady Boyle died two days ago. You know. His mistress.”

“Shit, that’s for real? I thought it was a rumour.”

“Funeral’s tomorrow. And you know the Boyles; it’s gonna be an all-out party.”

“I’m sure it’s what she would have wanted,” the first guard yawned. “You don’t think _I_ could kip in the saferoom?”

“Not a chance.”

Emily used her wings to get onto one of the chandeliers, and then looked at her three options. She could get directly into the balcony of the Spymaster’s Chambers from here – but he would be in there soon, and she didn’t want him to sound the alarm. Maybe she’d wait until she could catch him in his nightclothes, and then he’d be too embarrassed to call for help. Or maybe he wouldn’t, but it would still be funny.

Both other avenues lead into the rest of the Tower, and the Imperial Suite. Mrs. Pilsen was almost definitely there. All she had to do was get to her bedroom, and she could probably hop on chandeliers most of the way.

When she jumped over to one of the walkways, there was a loud buzzing noise filling her ears – not like Void objects, instead closer to a Wall of Light. When she turned, she saw that suspended in the stairwell on a set of metal beams was an arc pylon. That had never been there before – the stairs just lead to the kitchens downstairs and the broadcast tower upstairs.

She’d only been up to the tower once; she had been small, and she had decided to press all the buttons. There weren’t a lot of places that she couldn’t go, but the broadcast tower had become one of them.

“Mrs. Pilsen won’t be up there,” she told Atticus Ratticus in a low voice. He snuffled and did not comment.

She readied the Mark in her hand and jumped, combining her five wingbeats into one superbeat. She was propelled past the blaring pylon into the outside edge of its range on the stairs. Atticus squeaked at her for her daring move, and she chose to believe it was an expression of admiration and not contempt.

She climbed the stairs with her soft footsteps, and the broadcast operator (he had a fancy name, but she couldn’t remember) didn’t even notice her arrival. When he finally turned from his work and saw her, he screamed before closing a hand over his mouth.

“Are you here for me?” he asked, compensating for his loud scream with a soft voice that barely moved the air. He added, urgently, “Please, I can help you expose the Lord Regent. Everything he’s done to this city – we can end his reign. Just… just spare my life.”

Maybe Emily had taken the swashbuckling rogue look too far. The operator seemed to think she was an assassin; she wondered if many assassins were ten years old, or if she looked more grown up, like fourteen, maybe. There were probably fourteen year old assassins.

She showed her empty hands to indicate that she would not try to kill him, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“There’s a safe, in the Regent’s bedchambers. There’s all sorts of incriminating details in there – including audiographs that he makes for himself. I haven’t heard them, but I’ll bet all the gold in my pouch that playing one or two over the loudspeakers will ruin him. I saw the combination over his shoulder when he called me in to issue an announcement – it’s 9-3-5.”

There was a keypad separate from the main control panel, and he started keying something in. “I’ll add you in to the protocol for the arc pylon so you can come and go. The citywide broadcast button is here,” he indicated a big button on the console, before pointing to a slim rectangular slot with an unlit indicator next to it. “Just slot the audiograph in and hit play.”

Emily nodded in understanding and made her way back down the stairs. The lights were still lit in the Spymaster’s Chambers, so she couldn’t get to the safe just yet. In that case, it was time to try and find Mrs. Pilsen.

The chandeliers felt a little precarious to hop between, some of them wobbling and causing Watch officers to squint upwards in confusion. Her progress wasn’t as quick as she’d have liked, and while she hurried to her next perch, she misjudged the distance and dropped too quickly. She managed to grab onto the edge of the fixture, but then she was stuck swinging there, legs dangling.

She could hear an officer approaching; she was obscured from their view for now, but pretty soon she would be in plain sight, and the rocking of the chandelier was already starting to draw attention from the sentry posted outside the General’s office.

_“There are quiet places hidden in the walls. The lamps light the way.”_

She was thinking that this really wasn’t a good time for the Heart’s cryptic nonsense when her eye caught a lamp fixed on the wall beside the nearest empty fireplace. It was the only one she’d seen that wasn’t illuminated.

She summoned an illusory sound to turn away the guards facing in her direction for a moment, and then dropped to the carpeted floor and pushed the sconce until it was turned on its side.

Swiftly and quietly, the stone backing of the fireplace rose, creating a gap big enough to duck through. She entered hastily and pulled the lever on the other side of the fireplace to close the entrance behind her.

It was a small room, with barely enough space for a grown-up to lie down on the floor. The only things inside it were a desk and chair, an end table, and a filing cabinet. All the furnishings looked battered, like they’d been rescued from a heap of things to be thrown away.

The Heart beat steadily as she looked around, and she was surprised to hear the singing of a bone charm from the top of the cabinet. On top of the desk was an audiograph player with a card already slotted inside it, and as she climbed on the desk to reach the bone charm, she noticed that its details had been filled in with delicate handwriting; it was addressed to her, from her mother.

She clipped the charm onto her sash and stepped down. Her eyes stayed on the audiograph, as if fearing it would disappear when she looked away. She took hold of the Heart in her pocket and pressed play.

“Emily—my daughter.”

Her breath hitched at the sound of her voice. Soft and controlled and not all clogged up with blood and tears and desperation.

“I know that one day you’ll be grown up, and I wonder what you’ll remember of these years. Will you recall your time as a child with fondness? Or were there too many caretakers? Formal dinners and lessons about… boring old history?” There was something of a laugh in her tone at the last part, and Emily found herself smiling with her.

“Maybe the precious hours we spent together will shine brighter - time captured now and then with your mother and with Corvo-- who is always close to my heart. I hope the season of rats and plague will be nothing more than a passing shadow on your early memories. A crisis come and passed, weathered by your mother and her advisors.”

Something in her tone made her feel like she doubted it, even as she was saying it. Why had she recorded this? Why didn’t she say any of this in person?

“You’ll sit on the throne someday, and will do well, I hope. It’s a tricky life, full of responsibility and peril. It was not your choice to be the daughter of an Empress, but I believe you’ll rise to the challenge.”

Her heart swelled, and the one in her hand beat to match it. Suddenly she felt guilty for not coming back sooner – for not being the Empress that her mother wanted her to be.

“Stay good-hearted, Emily.” In the recording, her voice wobbled, and Emily was unable to resist the tears that rose in her own eyes. “Keep drawing, and telling stories. And only share your power with those you truly trust.”

The audiograph clicked and reset, and tears splashed onto the floorboards. Atticus Ratticus rubbed his face up on her cheek, and she smoothed a finger down his neck with a smile. She felt an urge to leave a drawing for her mother in this room, as a promise. There was a piece of paper on the end table, and she picked it up, but found it already occupied with words:

_Corvo,_  
_I have missed you while you’ve been away._

Emily stopped reading. Once when she was little, she had seen her mother whisper something into Corvo’s ear. His smile had glowed with warmth in the firelight of the west drawing room and she, always eager to learn secrets, had asked what she had said.

“I can’t tell you. It’s the most important kind of secret,” Mother had teased. “Corvo’s the only one I trust to keep it safe.”

While she was looking at Emily, Corvo was looking at her with a tender kind of softness that was its own sort of secret. This is what love was; a thing for quiet private spaces, warm and soft and secret.

This letter was another kind of secret, for Corvo’s eyes only. She folded it up and left it next to the audiograph player. She’d been told once that she would get to know the secrets when she got older. So she’d wait until she was older; fourteen was probably grown-up enough.

She pulled the lever on the fireplace and slipped out of the hidden room, listening for patrols as she did. It was about time she payed the Lord Regent his visit. She contemplated affording him the same welcome that she had with Campbell – but the Regent wasn’t as superstitious. He would probably just shout for help.

Getting into his chambers was easy – all she had to do was pull back the curtain separating his room from the balcony over the foyer. His snores floated through the room. Once her eyes adjusted to the dark, she keyed in the combination for the safe.

The creaking of the hinges didn’t disturb his loud slumber, and she took a pair of audiographs and a piece of paper out of the safe, as well as the box of jewels for good measure. She couldn’t carry the whole box, but she slipped a few of the pieces of finery into her pocket.

She read the note as she walked up the stairs of the broadcast tower, arc pylon buzzing harmlessly.

_Lord Spymaster,_  
_We had a specific agreement and I planned around it. You assured me that the girl would be alone; the bodyguard wasn’t supposed to be there. The price of the job just went up by 40%. Leave the coin at the alternate dead drop we agreed on or I’ll come collect the fee myself._

The note wasn’t signed, but Emily could picture its author. Blood red jacket and a scar down his face like a bolt of electricity. The man who killed her mother. She crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into her pocket.

The broadcast tower was empty, like the operator had said. She flipped over the audiographs to read the labels. Neither of them were addressed to anybody or from anybody, but the ‘message’ section was filled in.

One read ‘BEDROOM’ and the other read ‘DO NOT PLAY’. She slotted the second card into the machine, flipped the switch for city-wide broadcast, and listened to him condemn himself.

“We didn’t have to be in this mess. I am _not_ the one to blame – if only everybody could understand the basic rules of logic!” he began.

“My Poverty Eradication Plan was meant to bring prosperity to the city, to rid us of those scoundrels who waste their days in filth and drink, without homes or occupations other than to beg for the coin for which the rest of us toil.

“And it was a simple plan – bring the disease-bearing rats from the Pandyssian Continent, and let them take care of the poor for us. The plan worked perfectly. At first. But the rats – it was as if they sought to undo me. They hid from the catchers, and bred at a sickening rate. Soon it didn’t matter, rich, poor, all were falling sick.

“And then people began to ask questions. The Empress assigned me to investigate whether the rats had been imported by a foreign power. I knew the truth would come out eventually. I knew that if some horrible tragedy should befall the Empress and her daughter, I would have a chance to attack the plague with some real authority. It was really the only thing I could do to be rid of her. For the good of the Empire!

“As Lord Regent I could really _do_ something. Quarantines! Deportation of the sick! But there’s always some idiot woman searching for her wretched lost babe, or some snivelling workman searching for his missing wife. And then quarantine is broken!

“But you can see how my plan should have worked? Would have worked! If everyone had just followed orders. If everyone had just seen reason.”

She considered playing the other card as well, just to add insult to injury, but tossed it aside. She had a suspicion that it would do more harm to her to hear it than what he would already be facing. As she headed downstairs, she heard two guards confronting the Lord Regent, who they’d apparently caught trying to get up to the broadcast room to stop the audiograph.

“I can make you rich, both of you!” he was struggling against the hold of one of the women, but he looked especially weedy and pathetic without his big coat and boots. His nightclothes were just as tasteless as his words.

“You killed half the city, Hiram,” the other guard said coldly. “No amount of money can undo that. Come on, let’s get this traitor to Coldridge.”

“Yes sir.”

“Let’s go,” she whispered to Atticus. They could take the stairs all the way down and get out through the kitchens while everybody dealt with the commotion upstairs. Maybe they could even snag some little pork pies or cheese twists on the way.

Her mouth was starting to water just thinking about it, but before she could even set off down the rest of the stairs, the rat jumped off her shoulder and tore down the hallway.

“Atticus,” she hissed, taking long, quick strides to keep up. “What are you doing? Get back here!”

He kept running, squeezing through the door that was closing behind the guards, and she followed. She wasn’t far behind the officers and their charge, but anybody that crossed their path was too busy gawking at the spectacle to notice a white rat chasing them down the hallway or Emily ducking behind cover trying to keep up.

They had descended to the ground floor and Burrows was being paraded among the display cases when an odd rumbling sound made everybody pause. The air had the density of steel wool in the silent moment that passed before the rats appeared.

They emerged from every conceivable place; from beneath the cases, inside the vents, between the floorboards, under the skirting boards. Despite the screams of the Watch officers and the serving staff, they didn’t appear to be attacking anyone – instead they were gathering in the centre of the room in a squirming vortex. The officers holding Burrows released him to run, proclaiming witchcraft, but their prisoner stayed rooted to the spot, lip quivering in terror as he watched the rats rise into a mound in front of him.

The mound became a tower, and Emily watched the creatures writhe and climb in impossible ways and then fall down, back into the swarm, leaving the shape of a figure. It had its back to her, but its long coat was stained plum where blood had dried into it, and its face must have been terrifying because the Spymaster’s knees were caving in.

It took a moment for her to realise that the loud thumping she could hear was a product of the Heart, and not her own pulse. She remembered its poem, about the lonely Marked boy who was friends with a little white rat. How he stood tall and fearless as rats devoured all the people who hurt him – how he’d died of a plague brought about by a greedy, wicked man.

This was his vengeance.

“Please,” Burrows blubbered. “Please, have mercy. Are you even real? Or, or, or a hallucination? My eyes… they see what they fear.”

The rat man said nothing, just stood with his companions making an ocean of fur at his feet.

He grew more disturbed by the second. “What do you intend to do? I must know! Are you even _capable_ of mercy?!”

He rose his arm – hands coated scarlet – and the rats surged. They pounced on the Spymaster, sticking their sharp teeth into his skin and tearing. Emily couldn’t look away, even when he was dragged to his knees, shrieking loud enough to curdle the blood that was bursting from him.

When the noise stopped, the rat man lowered his arm. He descended back into the rippling mass of brown and grey and black and white until he’d completely vanished, like a phantom.


	8. From the Bottom of my Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emily gives chase.

Emily put everything she had into each and every step and jump and beat of her wings and she was still barely keeping up with the storm of vicious rats tumbling through Dunwall Tower.

The guards that were supposed to keep everything in order were stirring up more panic than anybody else, and it was easy for her to run past them without having so much as a shout thrown after her. The rats weren’t attacking anybody, although the mayhem suggested otherwise, instead moving with deadly intent to a target that she couldn’t yet see.

Her neck felt bare in the spot where Atticus usually sat – she’d got used to his presence over the last few days. For him to run off so suddenly felt like a betrayal, though she felt sheepish to admit that, even to herself. She’d been silly to think of him as a sidekick, really.

But still. She was going to get him back.

The dark shape of the Rat Man rose out of his companions as they neared a turn in the hallway, and she thought his target must be just around the corner – but he didn’t stop, didn’t turn, instead barrelled straight into the window at the end and smashed clean through.

She didn’t have time to think; she had to stay on his tail. She leaned into the run, readied her wings, and jumped, following his lead into the Dunwall Tower courtyard, where the guard was scrambling cluelessly.

He had landed on one of the Watch shelters and was gliding across it. “S-stop!” one of the guards ordered, fumbling for his gun. “Stop there!”

The Rat Man didn’t slow down, and before the officer had a chance to finish raising his pistol, he was flung from the station to the ground with a scream.

Not too far away, the sirens of Coldridge Prison were blaring into the night – that seemed to be his destination, hopping over the walls of the tower grounds towards the drawbridge. Emily could hear indistinct yelling in the courtyard, and gunshots started firing in their direction. She ducked her head and kept running, hoping that her dark coat and small stature would keep her from being seen.

On the outermost edge of Dunwall Tower, the Rat Man paused, and she was mid-step when his head whipped round to stare her right in the eyes.

Her wingbeats faltered from the shock of it – a face made of the black slate of the Void, made of death itself, piercing right through her eyes and into her soul.

Then he jumped from the Tower, gone, and she fell onto the hard-packed mud, jarring her knees and making her palms sting. Her breaths were quick and shallow, and for once she could hear her pulse in her ears louder than the Heart.

_Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum._

She scrambled back up the wall and peered out at the moat that the Rat Man had jumped into – _into_ , not over – and watched him disappear in a shadowy flurry to the sewers. She glanced at the prison, and saw a gaping entrance with shredded gory carcasses lying in it. He must have already made his visit there. Emily was not eager to return to the sewers after she’d only just had her clothes washed, and she had to wonder again if there was such a thing as fate when a magpie landed on the battlements beside her.

“I need to borrow your wings,” she told it, still a little breathless, and the bird squawked. The Mark on her hand lit up and her perspective changed in a stomach-turning motion from her own to the bird’s.

In her new body, she swooped down low to the sewer entrance and resumed her pursuit, twisting through tunnels that all looked the same and being thankful for the bird’s unrefined sense of smell.

When the Heart’s tugging finally turned upwards and out of the sewers, Emily at first thought they had come out in the middle of the river somehow, before she processed the dark, water-damaged buildings standing side-by-side and lonely in the murk. This was the Rudshore Financial District.

The Rat Man mustn’t have been a fan of hagfish, because he avoided the water now, hopping between the rooftops instead. As her talons touched down on the slate roof of the Greaves Refinery, the magpie was released from her power and took flight without her, perhaps back to its perch in Dunwall Tower. She ran to catch up to the man, keeping her wings ready in case the tile was slippery or came loose. She followed him from the old waterfront further into the district, towards Central Rudshore. They were nearing the heart of the flooded area, the part that people had started telling ghosts stories about; wild hounds that howled the night away. Giant serpents that swum in from the sea and filled the underwater streets with their width. Dens of assassins who moved like smoke in the night.

Emily didn’t give a lot of credit to that last one until she saw the people in whaling masks hanging around the old Chamber of Commerce building. They were an awfully long way from the whaling yards and besides…

She remembered sight of them from the roof of Dunwall Tower, and the way they’d appeared from nothing in the gazebo, one after the other while Corvo fought them off. The flash of light that threw him up and out of the way, the feeling of a leather-gloved hand gripping her hair.

“Hey, do you know where Daud is keeping Campbell’s little black book?” one of assassins asked another. Both were leaning against the half-demolished wall of a building, guarding the entrance to the Commerce building.

“What? Why would Daud have Campbell’s book?” parried the other one.

“Are you telling me no one thought to grab it? That book could open so many avenues for us. It’s full of blackmail material for nobles all over the city.”

“We didn’t do Campbell.”

“What are you talking about? Yes we did. He sent that troop of Overseers to try and take us out so we made him disappear.”

“Nope. The guy just vanished. Nothing to do with us. Whoever it was did us a favour, though.”

There was a beat of silence. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just really wanted that book.”

She was engrossed in their conversation for a moment – she had been disappointed at the prospect that Campbell had never made it to Pandyssia, and relieved to find that the Whalers hadn't intercepted him – and she almost lost track of the Rat Man, who was avoiding all of the assassins. She caught up just as his swarm of rats got inside the building. She followed from above, crooking herself into rafters and watching. Behind one of the Whalers, he rose up and wrapped his arms around their neck. There was a _crack_ that made her skin crawl, and then the _thunk_ of their body hitting the floor.

“I suppose the Lord Regent sent you,” said a man with a voice like gravel, and Emily blinked several times to make sense of him; even in his red coat, he’d seemed to blend into his surroundings seamlessly. He was tending to some papers on his desk, not looking at his visitor, as though he wasn’t worried about his safety at all. She felt in her gut that this was the man the other assassins had referred to as Daud.

When Daud turned his head, she could clearly see the scar like a ragged lightning bolt down his face, and a sharp, sardonic grin. She remembered a scowl on that same face as he reached for her arm, how her mother had pushed her out of the way and faced him instead.

How she’d heard steel slide through her stomach.

“He seems like a man who doesn’t take kindly to loose ends,” he said, drawing his sword in a motion so casual that it looked more like readying a paintbrush. “But who do you send to kill the best killer in the Empire?”

The Rat Man had not moved since turning to face the assassin – she could see his horrible face again, and it was both unsettling and entrancing. He was as still and silent as a statue, and the only sound in her ears was the thumping of the Heart. The clockwork inside it ticked and whirred, and then it spoke:

_“This is not a man. He is a shell, searching for a missing piece of himself. Cursed to remember only hatred for the ones who hollowed him out.”_

He reached up with his hand, not to command his rats but to touch his dark, bare skull. With sudden clarity helped by her enhanced vision, she saw that the Void-like shifting of his features was created by mechanisms behind a mask of black steel. As the mask came away from his face, she was struck with a sudden, heart-stopping certainty that what she was about to see wasn’t the remains of a lonely street urchin but—

“Corvo,” Daud says. His sword hand falters as he meets his eyes.

“Corvo,” Emily whispers.                                                

The man that used to be Corvo Attano whips a sword from his belt and roars. He swings at Daud with a fast, reckless slash, forcing him to take a step back while he hastily blocks with his own blade.

Corvo keeps hacking at him, relentless and feral. Daud transverses to the other side of the room when he gets to close to being cornered, and Corvo snarls and stalks towards him, keeping his eyes locked on his prey. Daud advances on him as well, refusing to be locked into a position of weakness, and Emily is certain that the very next swing will draw blood to whoever is on the other end of it.

With her heart in her throat and Corvo’s in her pocket, she pulls her scarf off her face, leaps down from her perch and shouts at both men to stop, landing in between them. She addresses Daud first, not letting her pride at his shocked expression show, and repeats, “Stop.”

When she turns around to Corvo, she feels a lump in her throat. There’s blood crusted around his eyes, which are dark as ever but dull and lifeless now. Pronounced shadows rest under his cheekbones, and his hair is wild and matted and greasy.

“Corvo,” she says. “Can you hear me? It’s me. It’s Emily.”

He’s breathing heavily, adrenaline and rage still surging, but he’s still.

“You’ve lost something,” she tells him, taking a careful step towards him. “You think if you keep hurting the people who took it away, it’ll come back. But it won’t.”

Another step. Her own heart is hammering at her ribcage as she stares at the vacancy in his eyes. Is he even there? Is he even listening? Slowly she reaches into her pocket and produces the Heart, beating fervently in her hand, full of all his life and love. Desperate to be a part of him again.

_Da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum._

“It’s your heart, Corvo,” she says, and she presses the pulsing muscle into his free palm. “Listen.”

The sword in his other hand clatters to the floor as he takes the Heart in both hands with delicate care. The golden glow bursting from it reflects in his eyes, and slowly the brightness in them isn’t just a reflection but _real_ , there, and the hate and rage that was all knotted up in his face and his shoulders smooths away and he’s looking at her, _really_ looking at her… and _smiling_.

It spreads slowly across his face until that’s all there is, and she doesn’t even notice the Heart fade and disintegrate because suddenly he’s got her underneath the arms and he’s twirling her around and she’s shouting his name in joy. His laugh is far from clear and bright but it’s _real_ , and that means it’s perfect, and it’s impossible for her not to catch the giggles.

“I thought I lost you,” she said in a little voice with a little smile as he set her down.

He put a hand to his chest in theatrical shock, and then shook his head.  _Me?_ he was saying, with his eyes and his smile. _Never._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting the final part of the fic at the same time as this chapter so that you don't have to wait for the conclusion. You're welcome. And thank you for reading!


	9. Brittle Bones and Shallow Heartbeats

“Corvo?”

He was surprised to see Emily standing partially hidden by the cracked-open door – he used to be able to pick out her footsteps. He thought the bone charms she was trying to hide under her pyjamas might be something to do with it.

He beckoned for her to come in, lowering his book and sticking his thumb between the pages with his other hand so that he didn’t lose his place.

She smiled, coming fully into the room and hugging Mrs. Pilsen tightly in her arms as she approached. “I can’t sleep,” she said, and he opened his arm to invite her into his lap. It was a familiar motion, but one that felt different now that Jessamine wasn’t here. As if it changed something – as if he couldn’t pretend he was only her Protector any more.

“What are you reading?” she asked, taking his book as she settled in and opening it to the page he had stopped on.

He took it from her hands and moved it to the arm of the sofa, leaning in close to her ear and telling her, “Not for little sparrows.” His voice was still hoarse and fragile, and he could only speak as loud as a murmur, but that was okay; Emily always understood him perfectly, and she was the only one he actually cared to talk to.

She nestled into his chest and he felt a sharp pain in his ribs that made him grunt involuntarily. She immediately lifted her head to look at his face and apologised in a meek voice. She had been so gentle with him in the days since they returned to Dunwall Tower. Afraid she would break him and lose him again.

She tried to hide it, of course. She was Strong and Grown Up now, she said. She would be _his_ Protector now, she said. And, okay, more than once she’d caught him as his knee buckled and propped him up until he could stand alone again. And she’d been utterly fierce in the courtroom, not letting any crooked old man tell her what her priorities should be - no she _wouldn’t_ be hosting a ball for the sovereigns of the Isles because her _absolute_ first point of order was to grant complete protection to everybody suffering the plague (and to tear down the Lord Regent’s statues, too). Jessamine would have been proud.

But she was still his little girl. She still doodled sea monsters on every scrap of paper she could find and asked the cooks for sweets on sweets on sweets. She still told him with utter delight that the patch over his eye made him look like a pirate, and found it hard to understand all the jargon of the world she’d inherited too soon. She still needed Corvo to chase her nightmares away and remind her that she wasn’t alone any more.

He shook his head, easing her back against his chest with his hand. She leaned into his hand as he stroked her hair – so much longer than it had been when he last saw her, longer than it had ever been, reaching all the way down to her shoulders. He only stopped when he felt her breaths even out into the sleepy pattern that hadn’t changed from when she was a baby.

Emily’s hand had slackened from Mrs. Pilsen, and he couldn’t help but stare at the black Mark that was left there. She kept it wrapped in silk for most of the day, but now it was unavoidable.

He felt as if it was staring at him. He covered her hand with his own and curled the fingers he had left into her palm. She closed her own fist around them as she slept.

The Royal Interrogator had had instructions not to touch his right hand – that was the hand that was going to sign the confession, so it couldn’t be damaged. The left had been expendable. What he had left was his thumb, index, and middle finger, as well as half of his ring finger. The Interrogator had been working his way across in segments before his prisoner died, confession unsigned, with none of the relevant witnesses.

He was told that Royal Interrogator and Executioner Morris Sullivan had died in a freak attack of plague rats swarming Coldridge Prison.

Funny how things worked out.

The ferocious haze he’d been had seemed eternal and all-consuming. He didn’t have memory of it, exactly, but he felt a strange intimacy when the events were recounted to him, as if he was recalling a dream. Sometimes his eye would be caught by a flash of movement and he’d be struck by a feeling that he couldn’t quite place. He didn’t truly know what it had been like for his soul to be separated from his body; all he knew was that he was glad it was over.

Glad that Emily had saved him.

The first thing he could remember clearly was her face looking up at him – those deep brown, serious eyes with the hopeful spark, just like his own. A watching eye, his mother used to say, as he perched in trees and observed the comings and goings of the Batista District in Karnaca. Emily looked more like him than she ever had in that moment, dark eyes matching dark hair that was wild and long about her shoulders.

And then she’d smiled a winner’s smile, so unbecoming of an Empress, and spoken his name with a fondness paralleled only by her mother, and it was Emily, _his_ Emily, in his arms. No one else – not Burrows and his treachery, not Daud and his sword, none of them –  had mattered for that moment; his whole world, his whole heart, had returned to him.

He kissed the top of Emily’s head while his heart thrummed away inside his chest, glad to be home.

He couldn’t be sure exactly when he fell asleep, only that he woke in a place that chilled him to the marrow – a place somehow familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, washed in blue.

“Hello, Corvo,” said a voice, ceremonial, and a young man appeared in front of him, dressed all in black and with a face as white as bone. “We meet at last.”

And yet there was something in his tone that seemed to imply that they were old friends. That he had insight into some other world, some other Corvo, who hadn’t died in Coldridge Prison. Who had been there for his daughter when she needed him.

“I feel I owe you an apology,” he said, bringing his hand to his chest and bowing a little. He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest. “As you teetered on the edge of the Void, I felt your shattered heart and thought it could be of use to Emily. All that was left behind in your body was rage and confusion – and so it started to seek out its tormentors. I'm older than the rocks this place is built on, and even I didn't see that coming.”

None of that was an apology.

Corvo lifted his left hand so that the back was facing the Outsider, levelling his stare with the cavernous black eyes.

“I cannot take my Mark away from Emily,” he replied, raising his chin and starting to pace in front of him. “I know how you must feel; like you can’t protect her. Like she’s dipping her toes into waters infested with horrors beyond her comprehension. But the only way for that power to return to the Void is for its bearer to perish.”

He stepped closer to the trickster, feeling hot thunder under his skin – fear of losing her clutched around his heart like a vice. He didn’t know how fighting a god would work, but he was willing to try if it made him think twice about coming near Emily again.

The Outsider smiled and raised his palms. “There’s no fun in being needlessly cruel,” he said, as if it were supposed to be reassuring. “I won’t harm Emily. She’s much too interesting. But as I said, I owe you an apology, so I’m willing to do you a favour. I can transfer her power to someone else. There will be no trace of the Void left in the young Empress, and I will never trouble her dreams again. Agreed?”

Corvo hoped to communicate with his eyes that if there were a single word of falsehood in his words, there would be consequences outside of his interdimensional comprehension.

He looked amused by the very idea.

That would have to do; Corvo nodded once.

The feeling that spread across the back of his hand started as an itch, but grew into a burn in an instant. As he clutched his wrist, he watched the Outsider’s Mark glow like molten steel and then settle to a bottomless black pit that absorbed all light.

Every part of his voice was dripping with the sly smile on the Leviathan’s lips. “Good luck, Lord Protector,” he said.

The dream vanished so quickly that for a hazy moment, Corvo was unsure if he had ever been asleep. He looked at his hand enveloping Emily’s – inked in the symbol of dark magic he’d wanted to protect her from. He separated their hands and saw the unblemished back of hers, as promised, and sighed. If it kept her safe, then it was worth it. What was one more scar?

Somewhere in the room, he heard a squeak, and spotted a small white rat poking its head timidly from under a bookshelf. It zigzagged its way closer to the sofa, stopping and starting and glancing up at them frequently.

“You must be Atticus Ratticus,” he said, and it came out as a scratchy whisper. Any louder and he felt sure his throat would start to bleed. “Thank you for bringing Emily back to me.”

The rat acknowledged his thanks with another few squeaks and then scampered up the side of the sofa and wriggled his way under Emily’s hand.

He let the steady rise and fall of her little chest put him back to sleep. Just as it had always been, her breathing was as soothing to him as his heartbeat was to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End!  
> Thank you for making it all the way to the end, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you have any thoughts or comments you'd like to share, I'm eager to hear!


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